The following is taken from the blurb accompanying the above video:
‘Don Taylor’s ‘The Exorcism’ has an unusually convoluted history; originally a one-hour stand-alone TV production, it was shuffled into the roster of the 1972 horror anthology series Dead of Night. It was screened as the First Episode in the series, on the incongruous date of November 5th. Incongruous, because The Exorcism is set at Christmas, and is very much about Christmas, or at least the social inequities highlighted by the festival. Odd to screen it on Bonfire Night – though this was corrected when the play was repeated on Boxing Day in 1973. It was dusted off again by BBC4 at Christmas 2007. However, in the meantime Don Taylor had revised and expanded his play, developing it into a theatrical version that was subsequently produced for the stage. In 1992 this longer, theatrical version was adapted for BBC radio and broadcast as part of that year’s Christmas Spirits season of ghost plays. This version features Susan Fleetwood in the crucial role of Rachel, and her delivery of the closing monologue is certainly as troubling as Anna Cropper’s performance in the television version.’
The UK, until around the abolition of ‘free’ Universal Education in 1988 – had far more in common with the average Soviet Republic – than any Bourgeois (capitalist) State of anti-intellectual America! Even after 1988, the British Welfare State and National Health Service (until 2012) still made the UK a relatively “Socialist” bastion that stood in defiance of both US and EU neo-imperialist ideology! Thatcher destroyed the comprehensive Socialist fabric of the UK – and in 1992 – the after-birth that was “John Major” invited a US “expert” to the UK with the intention of ‘weening’ the British population off of Welfare and health (paid for by collective taxation) delivered ‘free’ at the point of use!
This play was originally produced in 1972 – but above BBC radio adaptation was made in 1992 – a year after Mikhail Gorbachev engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union from within at the end of 1991! The removal of the threat of a Soviet Red Army advancing into Western Europe to “liberate” the oppressed working-class – led to the intensification and ardent advancement of US neo-imperialism throughout Western Europe (and the UK) via the agency of the European Union (EU) – administered by the US through Berlin. The concept of the “EU” was and remains a post-1945 US project designed to destroy Socialism and prevent its spread throughout Western Europe.
The suffering of the working-class (Proletariat) is an ongoing and firm material reality of predatory capitalism and Trotskyite misrepresentation – compounded by religious ignorance and pomposity. The Bourgeoisie has bequeathed us this form of collective ignorance and punishment – which sees the suffering inflicted by this selfish system upon its victims – as being the “fault” of the victims themselves! This is the classic “blame the victims” mentally. The author of this play obviously possesses a working understanding of Classical Marxist ideology – which overlaps with objective (Bourgeois) science by emphasising the material interpretation (and technological) manipulation of reality.
The US, for instance, exercises a ruthless “Marxian” (material) control of the scientific process – but uses this understanding to design and construct ever more destructive weapons which the US uses to attack any Socialist formations – whilst simultaneously “denying” the relevance (or efficacy) of the Marxist ideology! The capitalists manufacture (and sell to the working-class) the beds the workers eventually take to -and slowly starve to death within. This play demonstrates that the enriched minority lives in a physical and psychological state of disconnected opulence – whilst the workers whose labour creates this society – lives at best in a state of impoverished optimism.
Mindless or misplaced optimism does NOT change the brutal reality of predatory capitalism or the excessively selfish Bourgeois mindset it produces! Finally, this play was produced at a time when the Bourgeoisie was indulging in an orgy of celebration with regards to the collapse of the USSR and the Communist Bloc! Later, the UK would join the US in 1998 by blanket-bombing Yugoslavia for 78-days for daring to want to be “Socialist”! The original 1972 TV broadcast was around 50-minutes long – whilst the 1992 radio broadcast is around 90-minutes long. Although the time-periods were very different (Thatcher had virtually destroyed “Socialism” by 1992) – there are certain perennial themes implicit in the plot. Whereas the 1972 version might well be a critique of the genuinely affluent 1960s (assisted by a redistribution of wealth facilitated by the Welfare State) – the 1992 version is a critique of the disgusting greed and selfishness that defined ‘Thatcherism’! It is interesting that the central plot is flexible enough to embrace the two very different times within British history.
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 