Although perennially controversial, and frequently vilified in the press, British television playwright Dennis Potter was nevertheless sufficiently celebrated in 1993 to give that year’s James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture to an audience of TV industry luminaries. While unable to resist the opportunity to lay into the managerial style of the BBC’s new director general (“a churl in hob-nailed boots”), Potter also made an impassioned plea both for the power of the medium he loved, and for the way his own work used that power to focus his audience’s attention on “the victim, the one who cannot answer back, or, in many cases, the one who cannot talk at all.” In the case of Brimstone and Treacle, his 1976 televised play for the BBC, the author himself was silenced — the play was banned (“nauseating” though “brilliantly made” as the director of TV programs put it), and not broadcast until 1987.

Two of Potter’s abiding concerns meet in this recurring figure of inarticulate victimhood. In his class politics, it dramatizes the predicament of the working-class outsider struggling to find an authentic voice in middle- and upper-class bastions of cultural prestige. In his more troubled sexual politics, it stands for the terrible and imposed inarticulacy of the victim of sexual violence, the unspeakableness in ordinary language of what has happened to them. This same figure also has an inevitably mystical aspect: the stricken human animal will often be driven beyond language in the effort to articulate their sufferings.

The attempt to wrangle meaningfully with such a “beyond” is crucial to Potter’s dramatic technique. Famously, he will have characters break into song and dance routines, suspensions of realism in which they surrender their quotidian voices to lip-synced recitations of popular hits of the 1940s, “cheap songs” of earnest sentimentality that Potter described as having “something of the Psalms of David about them” in the longing they expressed for a world that was other than it is. Brimstone and Treacle follows another path out of language: not into the airy lightness of music, but into the guttural babbling and wailing of a severely disabled young woman.