Show Business: Notes From The Singing Detective

A sheet-music salesman reels through the Depression with murder on his mind, adultery on his conscience and a song in his heart. A young man walks into an English home to burgle a loveless couple and rape their brain-damaged daughter. An American woman, troubled by fantasies of her lost child, walks out on her philandering oaf of a husband, whom she may have stabbed to death. An aging British novelist pilfers the life of his beautiful niece for the plot of his new book. Another novelist, strapped to a hospital bed with a grotesquely disfiguring skin disease, plots revenge on all those who have loved him not quite enough.

Welcome to the world of English writer Dennis Potter: a nightmare realm of domestic violence, scored to the haunting lilt of pop standards. His output embraces dozens of television plays, half a dozen screenplays and two novels. But the range of Potter's work is less impressive than its searing ferocity and compassion. His haunted characters dwell in the surreal land we all inhabit, as we float vagrantly from suffocating reality to liberating fantasy, from pessimism to possibility, from fear to hope -- and then back, always back again, when we realize that the conditional tense holds even more horror than the present. Ultimately a Potter protagonist is likely to realize, like Dorothy back from Oz, that life is best endured at home. Just plant a bitter smile on your face, and whistle something sweet in the dark.

The mood suffused Potter's 1978 BBC serial, Pennies from Heaven (in which Bob Hoskins played the music salesman), his 1982 film, Brimstone and Treacle (with Sting as the satanic young man), and the current Track 29 (starring Theresa Russell as the American wife). In October his novel Blackeyes (about the plagiarizing novelist) was published, to acclaim, in the U.S., and last month the BBC aired his new series, Christabel, a domestic drama set in '40s Germany. Masterpiece Theatre will show the series in February.

The Potter celebration reaches its climax: The Singing Detective, his 1986 masterpiece about a hospitalized writer, has begun a six-week run in Manhattan's Public Theater movie house. When this 6-hr. 42-min. serial was broadcast on PBS earlier this year, it attracted a rabid cult following, and New York Times film critic Vincent Canby called it "one of the wittiest, wordiest, singingest-dancingest, most ambitious, freshest, most serious, least solemn movies of the year." Now Detective, handsomely directed by Jon Amiel, is on the big screen where it belongs -- and where it looks marvelous.