Yahoo Finance Peter Terson obituary
In 1967 the National Youth Theatre in London performed the first new play it had ever commissioned, with 80 performers arranged on a set depicting a football stand. The play would be revived with new casts eight times over the next 20 years, and again at Wilton’s Music Hall in London in 2017. It was televised twice, and entered the school curriculum. The play was Zigger Zagger, and its writer was Peter Terson, who has died aged 89.
The story of teenager Harry Philton and his friend Zigger Zagger, who draws Harry into a band of rioting football fans, has as its timeless theme the poverty of choices faced by a young, working-class male. Terson continued his exploration of this subject the following year with his next National Youth Theatre play, The Apprentices (starring Barrie Rutter), in which exploited young men turn cruelly and violently on each other.
Possibly no writer has done more to democratise drama in Britain. Earlier in his career, as a young resident playwright at the Victoria theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, brought in by its director, Peter Cheeseman, Terson plunged into the theatre’s dedication to regionalism, supported by postwar civic investment. Faithful to Cheeseman’s commitment to local documentaries about his audiences’ working lives, Terson’s scripts included The 1861 Whitby Lifeboat Disaster (1970).
Following the success of Zigger Zagger, he struck a wonderfully rich seam with three plays about three Yorkshire miners at leisure, played by Brian Glover, Ray Mort and Douglas Livingstone. The first of these, commissioned by BBC Radio, was The Fishing Party (1971), in which the trio are bullied and exploited by a ruthless Whitby landlady who assures them they will have “contact with a lavatory on all floors” at their lodgings. It won a Writers Guild award and was televised – as were the following two – as a BBC Play for Today. The second, Shakespeare or Bust (1973), centred around a canal trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Antony and Cleopatra that ends up with Antony (Richard Johnson) and Cleopatra (Janet Suzman) coming to their narrowboat after the three are unable to get tickets for the performance. The third, Three for the Fancy, set at a country livestock fair, followed in 1974, and the trilogy was at the heart of a celebratory retrospective at the British Film Institute in 2012.
Peter was born in Walker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to Peter Patterson, a joiner, and his wife, Jane (nee Best). He left school at 15, worked in a drawing office and briefly attended the city’s technical college. After national service with the RAF he trained as a teacher at Redland College in Bristol (1952-54), and there met fellow student Sheila Bailey, whom he married in 1955. He later changed his name, after becoming a professional writer, because he thought Peter Patterson a “bit of a mouthful”.
Ten years teaching PE and history followed; he later admitted that “I wasn’t very good and the boys saw through me, but were very supportive”. Already writing, he had “enough rejection slips to paper the walls” until in 1964 Cheeseman read, liked and produced A Night to Make the Angels Weep at the Victoria theatre.
Set in the Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire, where Terson then lived, the play told dark stories of rustic people whose lives are disoriented by the relentless tide of progress. Unschooled in stagecraft but with a flair for dialogue that combined naturalism with unforced poetry, Terson relished the Vic’s theatre-in-the-round set-up, which dispensed with the need for sets to negotiate.
His next play, now as resident playwright at the Vic, the Mighty Reservoy (1964), was about a new reservoir built threateningly close to a village, whose keeper believes that an act of sacrifice is necessary to avert a tragedy.
In 1965 he adapted the story Jock-at-a-Venture, by Arnold Bennett, into a play, Jock on the Go, that was seen by Michael Croft, founder-director of the National Youth Theatre, and that circumstance led to Zigger Zagger being taken up.
Terson continued to write through the 1980s, and his play Strippers was produced in his home city of Newcastle and in the West End, making the connection between asset-stripping of old industries and the housewives who bared all to make up for the pay packets their men had lost.
Always committed to work that was accessible to non-traditional theatre-going audiences, in the 90s he turned to writing large-scale community plays, working regularly with the director Jon Oram of Claque theatre, formerly the Colway Theatre Trust, and attracted by the instinct that many people with stories to tell had no way of telling them.
His plays, of which more than 80 were performed in his lifetime, were, according to Oram, always works in progress right up to the opening night, and Terson recognised that amateurs took decisions differently from professionals. “If they said the sense of a line in their words rather than his, then he would shout out ‘that’s better’ and keep the words in,” said Oram. “He’d see something in someone and develop it in the script.”
Terson also made sure he knew of what he was writing, on one occasion buying an authentic caravan, learning to harness a horse and setting out on the road, as he prepared to write about Romany life. When a genuine Romany challenged him to a fight, he accepted and lost two front teeth. The resulting “documentary play” for BBC Radio, The Romany Trip, was broadcast in 1983.
On another occasion he went to Butlin’s at Minehead in Somerset to do karaoke before writing about a holiday camp in Sailor’s Horse (1999), a community play involving hundreds. His final produced play was Campers (2001), written for Edensor school in Stoke-on-Trent, about racist attitudes and two very different campsites – one a luxury French holiday site, and the other a refugee camp in the Balkans.
Terson continued writing until the onset of Parkinson’s disease forced him to stop. He is survived by Sheila and their children, Neil and Janie, five grandchildren and a great-grand-daughter.
• Peter Terson (Patterson), playwright, born 24 February 1932; died 8 April 2021
