The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 29

Theatre QI Why is it that TV plays are still considered inferior to stage plays? The screen test Independent), Michael Hastings, our Literary Consultant, and I decided to hunt out old television plays and found it was hard to find even some of the most famous ones. I had an interest in Paddy Chayefsky, the star writer of America's "golden age of television" in the early 1950s and still the only person to have won three Oscars for best screenplay. But his classic plays were out of print and I finally found a battered collection in a second-hand bookshop in downtown Los Angeles. We pursued his masterpiece Marty but, since the rights would not be released by the film company, we opted for The Mother (1954). In this an elderly widow is determined to thwart convention and return to work is the meaning of my In these days of high-concept drama it is instructive to find a play that delights in the minutiae of human existence, what Chayefsky himself called "the marvellous world of the The pioneers of television drama discovered that the medium excelled at exploring, in the words of contemporary writer Tad Mosel "one simple happening, a day or even an hour and tried to suggest a complete The plays of Chayefsky, Potter and many others that have been neglected and unperformed for many years deserve to be rediscovered.

They come from a time where the writer was encouraged to write, where programme makers and audiences relished the challenge of substantial writing. But audiences today are still bold. They are sophisticated and eager and, like theatre audiences, want to learn about the present from the plays of the past. The legacy of television writing on both sides of the Atlantic is formidable, and exploring it can only enhance the status of all writers in television. Simon Curtis is Executive Producer of BBC2's Performance.

Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea is on November 12. The Mother can be seen on November 19. Both BBC2. One of the inspiring legacies left by the great Dennis Potter was that his achievement seemed to elevate the status of all television. The grief at his passing underlined the value the nation placed on our shared experience enjoying his work.

But Potter was unique and I believe the television industry has itself to blame if too often its output is undervalued. Even though the first television plays were performed live, before recording was possible, many of the plays of the sixties, the heyday of the Wednesday Play and Armchair Theatre, were taped. But somebody, somewhere, took the decision to wipe them. So early plays by the likes of Potter and David Mercer were lost forever. Another significant difference between theatre and television is that theatre plays are constantly re-evaluated and restaged.

Loving revivals of the early plays of John Osborne or Arthur Miller are regarded as important occasions. Stephen Daldry launched his regime at the Royal Court "the national theatre of new writing" with an extravagant production of Wesker's The Kitchen and it was hailed. On television it seems a play becomes old news, never to be discussed again, as soon as it has been transmitted. I think we are too afraid of repeats in this country, unlike in the United States where a new film like HBO's superb And The Band Played On received several showings close to its original broadcast. This enables a play to gather a reputation and the casual viewer to catch up with it before it disappears forever.

After a few years cramming theatre plays into the television studio Tennessee Williams go orii" Thomas Sutcliffe, The Simon Curtis HERE is an unspoken, belief that a theatre play is more significant than a television one, that it is somehow easier to influence the national debate with a play seen by a few thousand people in a theatre in London than by one available to anyone with access to a television. This assumption is reinforced by the fact that a theatre play of whatever quality is deemed wor-. thy of publication, yet only a few television masterpieces are available in print. When Dennis Potter encouraged us to remake his 1967 play Message For Posterity, it appeared this was the first time British television had made a second production of any television play. Moving from a career in theatre into television, it is easy to develop an inferiority complex.

Critics from every national newspaper attend an opening in a tiny space above a pub. At the curtain call they burst out as if they had witnessed the scoop of the century and then column inches are devoted to a serious discussion of the work. In the theatre you can see who is in your audience, feel the response and afterwards engage in a real dialogue. On television even a major event can be reviewed merely as a jokey one-liner or ignored altogether. The irony is that a television play can be watched by over a million people (tiny by TV standards but how many decades of capacity houses at the Bush?) and yet seem to be seen by no one.

As the credits rolled on the first play I produced for the BBC, I sat by the phone expectantly. Nothing. Finally I called my agent who said he'd recorded it and hoped to watch it later. A PASSIONATE WOMAN Comedy Theatre THE MUM'S Lib, Shirley Valentine school of drama gets a new boost with the arrival of Kay Mellor's A Passionate Woman at the Comedy after an earlier outing at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. It's a likeable decent, optimistic play; it's only when you start to compare it with a very similar work Ayckbourn's Woman In Mind that you realise the extent to which Mel lor takes the soft route to the summit.

Mellor's heroine, Betty, is a fiftysomething housewife who, on the morning of her son's marriage, retreats to her loft in the Leeds suburbs. Surrounded by the detritus of her life, she puts a Johnny Ma this record on the turntable, summons up the ghost of her dead lover and relives her passionate past when she had a 24-inch waist. Eventually she ascends to the roof while her husband confronts the son with his own embittered sense of exclusion; and, torn between the competing claims of family duty and her lover's deathly embrace, squatting Betty decisively opts for airborne independence. I applaud Mellor's message: seize the day. And she makes the telling point that inside many a staid suburban housewife lurks a suppressed IT romantic soul yearning to escape.

But, although Betty condemns her much-married sister for being all "self, self, you can't help thinking there's something a touch egotistical about a woman who chooses her son's wedding day to make her bid for freedom. And where Ayckbourn shrewdly shows in Woman In Mind how male fatuity propels his heroine into escapist fantasy, Betty's hubby emerges as a sad little man who is equally the victim of emotional repression. Obviously the play touches on something important: the old Ibsenite theme of self-realisation. I just feel the surprise conclusion supplants the awkward reality of total escape with a wish-fulfilling theatrical gesture. But Ned Sherrin stages Betty's loft conversion and rooftop drama with technical elan.

Stephanie Cole also makes Betty a superfically comfy homebody genuinely surprised by her own erotic memories and sudden audacity; and Neil Morrissey as the son, Alfred Lynch as the husband and James Gaddas as the lover tactfully ensure that not all the sympathy goes to this escapist cat on a cold tile roof. Michael Billington At the Comedy Theatre, London W1. Details: 071-369 1731. Moty Sweeney (Almeida, 071-359 4404). Brian Friel's moving three-hander, echoing Synge, about the private vision of the blind.

Catherine Byrne is infinitely touching as the sightless heroine: strong support is provided by McKenna and Mark Lambert. Hamlet (Gielgud, 071-494 5065). Stephen Dillane is a wonderfully quirky, jocular-depressive Prince in Peter Hall's swift-moving, four-hour production. The Cherry Orchard (Theatre Royal Glasgow, 041-332 9000). Susannah York stars in this witty and human production that makes considerable sense of Chekhov's claim that his elegiac drama was actually a comedy.

A pre-London run for the first-rate cast directed by Mikhail Mo-keiev of the Moscow Arts Theatre. Hot'nThrobbing (Harrogate Theatre, 0423-502116). European premiere of Paula Vogel's play about sex, pornography and violence. A writer of feminist erotica (Jennifer Glanville) finds she's losing control of her job, her teenage children, her drunken ex-husband and her own sexuality. Absorbing discussion of who's exploiting whom in the fantasy sex market is given a gripping, provocative production by Andrew Manley.

Private Lives (Citizens' Theatre Glasgow, 041-429 022). Back on the main stage after making way for a two-week run of the The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Noel Coward's partner-swapping comedy returns in a good-looking, accessible production directed and designed by Philip Prowse. Albee emerges, in the course of an hour's talk, as a serious craftsman, a natural teacher and a troubled American. But also as a sly humourist. Asked where the title for Who's Afraid Of Virigina Woolf? came from, he explained how in the early fifties he used to frequent a watering-hole on New York's 10th Street where he saw the phrase chalked up on a mirror behind the bar.

So a few years later he sat down to write a play called The Exorcism before hauling this bar-room scrawl out of his memory. "Do you know," he adds, "what the original title of A Streetcar Named Desire was? The Poker Night. Sometimes, I guess, you get lucky." Three Tall Women opens at Wyndhams (071-369 1736) on November 15. wright should also be a visual artist since a play is, amongst other things, a set of moving pictures." During his lean years, Albee also turned to directing. He's staged his own plays as well as works by Beckett, Mamet, Shepard and Lanford Wilson.

But what of the theory that writers are too close to their own work to be its best interpreter? "It's a canard," says Albee, "put out by the Society of Stage Directors to protect their own members. There are some writers who shouldn't even be allowed in the theatre: I adored Tennessee Williams but he would change anything anyone told him to during rehearsals, which is why so many of his plays exist in multiple versions. But you could name plenty of other writers Brecht, Beckett, Pinter for a start who have directed their own work brilliantly.".