Hilary Lloyd presents Very High Frequency, a major new commission that considers the scope and spirit of the trailblazing playwright, television dramatist and writer Dennis Potter (b 1935–d 1994).
Lloyd’s layered installation combines audiovisual elements with archival materials and performative interludes, staging a non-linear encounter with Potter’s work for and on television. Engaging with the themes, confrontations and atmospheres that defined Potter’s work, the exhibition navigates his explorations of illness, death, sex, power and class.
Potter has been lauded as Britain’s most pioneering playwright, television dramatist and writer. Best known for his TV serials, his Brechtian techniques brokered a meaningful and daring relationship between experimental theatre and television. Challenging the dominant naturalism of terrestrial television dramas, Potter successfully pioneered a multitude of dramatic devices to blur fantasy and reality, including intertwined flashbacks and fantasy sequences, direct-to-camera address, lip-syncing, musical interludes and the use of adult actors to play children. Although celebrated for his creativity as a screenwriter and journalist, Potter’s work and personal life were not without controversy and a number of his screenplays were banned by the BBC for decades.
Throughout her practice, Lloyd has presented still and moving images within precise arrangements of video equipment that inhabit the surrounding spaces like sculpture, connecting a physical dimension to the act of looking. Within Very High Frequency, Lloyd’s installation draws from backstage spaces, theatre sets and television studios. In an attempt to avoid conventional approaches to dramaturgy and performance, the films she presents resist standard notions of narration. Instead, Lloyd’s installation functions as a shifting tableaux to be encountered, placing the audience within a choreographed experience that unfolds from the many people, narratives, images, and locations that the artist has engaged with over the course of making the exhibition.
Key to Very High Frequency is a new series of short films that feature actors, producers and collaborators connected to Potter’s work and life. They include broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, whose own extraordinary interview with Potter weeks before his death is exhibited in full in the Project Studio, and producer Kenith Trodd, perhaps the dramatist’s single most significant collaborator. Often captured in abstracted or glancing portrayals, Lloyd’s subjects also include Gina Bellman (Blackeyes, Secret Friends), Richard E. Grant (Karaoke) and Alison Steadman (The Singing Detective, Karaoke). These filmed conversations and video vignettes form an impressionistic biography of Potter, shaped through Lloyd’s distinct lens.
Though Potter was always reticent to describe his work as straightforwardly autobiographical, he frequently drew close to autofiction - perhaps most famously in The Singing Detective, in which the crime novelist lead is hospitalised with psoriatic arthropathy, the same severe chronic illness as Potter. Likewise, in constructing an environment that stems from Potter’s impact and influences, Lloyd's own research has centred on key locations tied to Potter’s storytelling, in particular, the Forest of Dean where he was born.
Many of Potter’s works were set and filmed in the area at his insistence, and the Forest of Dean’s working-class communities and rural, post-industrial character deeply influenced his writing. As well as time spent within the forest itself, much of which is marked by its long history of collieries and free mines, Lloyd has worked with local residents who participated in Potter’s plays, including the Berry Hill Silver Band (The Beast With Two Backs, Cold Lazarus).
Within the Forest of Dean, Lloyd’s films include a record of Potter’s multiple original scripts, which are held at Dean Heritage Centre. Potter’s handwritten drafts are seen alongside typeset scripts and rehearsal notes, which bear his annotations and corrections. Filmed using a combination of moving and static camera techniques, close-up, panning sequences of text are interwoven with locked-off shots that linger on handwriting, marginalia and revisions in red ink, exploring the archive as both a material artefact and a textual record of creative labour.
Lloyd’s exhibition and accompanying public programme of screenings offer an opportunity to critically reflect on Potter’s enduring relevance to contemporary culture. Potter’s formidable influence across theatre, media, art and popular culture from Twin Peaks (1990) to Mad Men (2007) appears indivisible from his belief that television could be a significant vehicle for artistic expression. As Potter said in his 1993 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, “Here was a medium of great power, of potentially wondrous delights that could slice through all the tedious hierarchies of the printed word and help to emancipate us from many of the stifling tyrannies of class and status and gutter-press ignorance.”
