Erotic White Hotel made a mockery of the watershed
Once, during a long, rainy half-term at my grandparents’ house, I pulled a book at random from their shelves. It had a picture of a naked woman staring out across a lake, with flames crawling up the side of her body. I opened it, and fell headlong into one of the most erotic novels ever written.
The things the flaming lady was doing, and having done to her, were so shocking to my 11-year-old mind that they brought on a literal rush of blood to the head. Something popped in my nose, and fat scarlet drops splashed onto the pages. I blotted them desperately with loo roll, but the stains wouldn’t lift. So I closed the book and slid it back onto the shelf – permanent evidence, should anyone uncover it, of my sinful curiosity.
How much has changed in 36 years!
The White Hotel – D M Thomas’s experimental novel about female sexuality, Freud and the Holocaust – is now considered suitable material for Radio 4’s Afternoon Drama. And it’s no longer the sex that most rattles the senses.
Part of the occasional series Unmade Movies, this adaptation (broadcast on Saturday, and available on iplayer) had serious pedigree. It was written as a screenplay by Dennis Potter; David Lynch was going to direct it, with his lover Isabella Rossellini in the starring role, but pulled out when she left him. Every attempt to bring The White Hotel to the big screen has been shipwrecked by legal problems, lack of funding or thespian jitters, as Thomas explained during a short prologue to the play. Barbra Streisand once fancied the starring role, but apparently baulked when Bernardo Bertolucci suggested filming the sex scenes from inside the heroine’s vagina, using a fibre optic camera.
Radio, being relatively cheap and dependant on the audience’s imagination, is a better medium in which to attempt the impossible. No need for the leading lady to even take her clothes off – although Anne-marie Duff ’s ecstatic sighs were believable enough to make me blush.
Duff played Lisa, a Ukranian woman in Twenties Vienna, who’s having psychotherapy to treat mysterious pains in her left breast and pelvis. Her doctor (played by Bill Paterson) assumes that the cause is a buried childhood trauma, and urges Lisa to write down her feelings. She produces a manuscript of sexual fantasies. Meanwhile, it gradually becomes clear that her pains are in fact prophetic: her body is anticipating the sufferings that she – and the whole of Europe – will endure in the Second World War, culminating in her death, along with more than 30,000 Ukrainian Jews, at the massacre of Babi Yar.
Potter turned Lisa from an opera singer into a trapeze artist, thinking it would make better cinema. It did indeed create some lovely imagery (“Small oval blobs of faces, way below, look upwards as her arms gleam and stretch in flight”), but also made the central relationship less plausible. Could a circus performer have afforded the services of a famous psychotherapist? (In the novel, it was Sigmund Freud. Potter replaced him with the fictional Dr Probst, freeing him up for a more dramatic death.)
In every other respect, however, this adaptation was triumphant. Jon Amiel – who also directed Potter’s televisual masterpiece The Singing Detective – deployed a narrator (Simon Mcburney) to read Potter’s lyrical stage directions. In the background, scratchy jazz records gave way to Nazi loudhailers, nostalgia and dystopia seeping into each other as only Potter knew how.
After Lisa’s prophecies began to unfold – when she found herself lying on a heap of corpses at Babi Yar, a Nazi officer stamping on her breast and pelvis – the violence was almost too vivid to bear. I had to press pause and take a couple of turns around the kitchen to get my breath back. It was brilliant, but it made a mockery of the watershed.
After all that, it was a relief to switch over to Radio 3, and the kindly voice of Donald Macleod introducing his latest Composer of the Week. Macleod ruminated on the stories we tell ourselves about great artists. We assume they are born that way, predestined for genius. But Tchaikovsky showed no particular musical aptitude in his youth, instead studying law and going into the civil service.
When he started having music lessons after hours, Tchaikovsky discovered his true passion. But even then he remained circumspect. “I shall not give up work until I am finally sure that I am an artist, and not a civil servant,” he told his sister. Macleod brought out this contrast between Tchaikovsky’s talent and his modesty – the mild-mannered bureaucrat, bursting with some of the most beautiful music ever written – to delicious effect.