Naomie Stars In Poppy Shakespeare
Poppy Shakespeare is a novel about mental illness by Clare Allan. It tells the story of day patients at a mental health hospital. The central characters are Poppy Shakespeare, a new patient, and "N", a long term patient. Poppy arrives at the hospital strongly asserting that she is sane and demanding that she is released from the program. To gain legal aid she must first prove she is sick so that she can get "MAD money", a.k.a. state benefits. She is befriended by N, who helps her work the system.
Author Clare Allan spent ten years in a mental health institution.
The book was adapted by Sarah Williams and Cowboy Films to a 90-minute drama shown on Channel 4 on 31 March, 2008 and starred Anna Maxwell Martin as N and Naomie Harris as Poppy. The book was short-listed for the BT Mind Book of the year 2007 and long-listed for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007.
Based on the best-selling novel by Clare Allan, this Channel 4 drama is a tragic and ironic love story
Poppy Shakespeare: Naomie Harris as Poppy and Anna Maxwell Martin as 'N'. Photograph: Channel 4
I read Sarah Williams' script for Poppy Shakespeare before reading Clare Allan's novel, and what I liked most about it was that it made no sense - at least not in the way that scripts are conventionally meant to. The narrator had no name, you knew next to nothing about her past, the world was couched in its own self-referential language of "dribblers and sniffs" that had to be taken entirely on its own terms. And the plot, such as it was, hinged upon tiny, almost invisible things - secret viewing rooms that might or might not be part of a collective fantasy, emotional undercurrents between the characters of a very real and delicate ambivalence.
All the same, at the core of all this ambiguity was an accessible emotional journey of devastating power - the story of a friendship that goes badly wrong. The Dorothy Fish was clearly a symbolic world of bureaucratic nightmare out of Kafka. But the other, almost hidden truth of it was that it was also a place of choice, not coercion, at least for N, and that she and the other day patients found their only source of comfort here. Why had they chosen to live this life, why couldn't they understand why Poppy hadn't, or couldn't, and what did this conflict say about them and all of us?
Poppy and N's love story is tragic and ironic. It also documents a kind of unconscious fight for survival at the most elemental level - between the hidden strength of an institutionalised "victim", who is coming to know adult human warmth for the first time, and the terrifying vulnerability of a "normal" outsider, Poppy, whose life is tragically beginning to slip between the cracks. I felt that these wonderful characters whom Clare Allen had invented were paradigms for all of us, because their story touches upon great modern themes: madness and sanity, the institution and the individual, psychotropic medicine and human consciousness, and chiefly, responsibility and the state - the responsibility we relinquish when we allow a body of any kind to dictate the terms of our lives for us, the responsibility that we undertake when we love someone or are loved by them. Great, gigantic, universal human themes.
The beauty of all of this, for a director, is that it is entirely cinematic, because it deals in the nature of perception. Bad art, it seems to me, draws firm lines between the real and the imaginary. Good art, like Sarah's script and Clare's book, blurs those lines to enable the reader or viewer to inhabit the ambivalent space between them more fully, and to question their own perception of reality. The experience of watching Poppy Shakespeare should be unsettling in the best kind of way, like Rosemary's Baby or a late Alan Clarke film.
It is not a polemic about the state of the National Health Service or the nature of modern mental health care, although it is political in that it clearly derives from a very real sense of those worlds and the lived experience of people within them. It is, rather, a view of the institutionalised mind, from within - a place where the usual values and assumptions do not apply - and where we are therefore forced to question everything we see and hear, and usually take for granted, about human beings and their motivations.
For all of its sense of the tragic, and its deep pessimism about institutional structures, it is also full of human warmth, wit, survivor's gallows humour and deep irony and, therefore, devoid of the kind of self-importance that usually sinks polemical art. N is not a political mouthpiece, but one of the many dispossessed, and this film aims to give her an authentic voice. In all of this we were hugely assisted by some of the most gifted technicians and actors in the UK. And we are all indebted to the producers and to Channel 4, for daring to make the kind of film that (almost) doesn't get made any more.
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