Episodes cast for
"Performance" (1992) More at IMDbPro »

Season: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | unknown
Year: 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1998

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Season 1

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Season 1, Episode 0: Uncle Vanya

22 February 1991

Season 1, Episode 1: Absolute Hell

5 October 1991
Black comedy set in Soho, London, right after WW2. Half of the fun is seeing a slew of very familiar faces kick up their heels as gay men, lesbians, party-girls, drunks, and drag queens.

Season 1, Episode 2: Nona

19 October 1991

Season 1, Episode 3: Old Times

26 October 1991

Season 1, Episode 4: Top Girls

2 November 1991

Season 1, Episode 5: The Trials of Oz

9 November 1991
Dramatization of the famous 1971 trial in which the editors of the British underground magazine "Oz" were charged with obscenity.

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Season 2

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Season 2, Episode 1: Tales from Hollywood

19 October 1992
A slightly ironical description of the colony of German artists in Los Angeles, who had to leave their country during the Nazi-regime. A young playwriter (von Horvath) joins them and finds out, that there are gaps between the artistical attitudes and the real live behavior of authors like Thomas or Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger or Bertold Brecht.

Season 2, Episode 2: A Doll's House

29 March 1992
Nora Helmer has years earlier committed a forgery in order to save the life of her authoritarian husband Torvald. Now she is being blackmailed lives in fear of her husband's finding out and of the shame such a revelation would bring to his career. But when the truth comes out, Nora is shocked to learn where she really stands in her husband's esteem.

Season 2, Episode 3: Roots

28 November 1992

Season 2, Episode 4: After the Dance

5 December 1992

Season 2, Episode 5: Six Characters in Search of an Author

12 December 1992
Six fictional characters in an unwritten play appear to a theatrical company and demand that the company act out the characters' tragic story.

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Season 3

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Season 3, Episode 2: The Maitlands

13 November 1993
In the secluded coastal resort of Betworthy, the Maitland family has fallen on hard times and the eldest son Roger, a schoolmaster, is forced to give a young boy after-school tuition in order to pay for his jet-setting wife Dorothy's trip to the French Riviera. His mother, Mrs. Maitland, puts her hope in a legacy from her brother while their live-in cousin Phyllis plans to escape poverty and the tedium of Betworthy by accepting a marriage proposal from Major Luddington. Everything changes, however, as the younger Maitland brother, Jack, returns home for a visit and Phyllis falls in love with him. Jack, who left the family years ago to seek his fortune in London, is now a rich and successful actor, a career choice of which his family never approved, which, in his opinion, gives him the perfect excuse to treat them just as badly as he wishes. Further trouble comes along as Joan, an old friend of Phyllis's, suddenly pays a visit to the house and falls in love with Roger.

Season 3, Episode 3: Hedda Gabler

27 March 1993

Season 3, Episode 4: The Entertainer

4 December 1993
Uses the metaphor of the dying music hall tradition, specifically fictional music hall star Archie Rice, to comment on the moribund state of the British Empire in the 1950s.

Season 3, Episode 5: The Changeling

11 December 1993
Just days before her wedding, Beatrice-Joanna has a chance encounter with Alsemero, and realizes that she has met her one true love. To marry the man she loves, she persuades the love-struck henchman De Flores to murder her fiance, but does not anticipate the tragic consequences of her actions.

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Season 4

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Season 4, Episode 1: Message for Posterity

29 October 1994
Cast member Bruce Alexander recalled: "'Message for Posterity' was remade as a tribute to [Dennis Potter] just after his death the original recording of the early 60's having been lost by the BBC. As a result we under the direction of David Jones reproduced the original script with painstaking (perhaps over-scrupulous) accuracy, honouring every comma and letter in a way for which television is not renowned. The play was intriguing as a result but in style smacked of an earlier era of televised drama with long scenes and a quasi-theatrical interest in the spoken word rather than action. It was all quite a bit different from the later more overtly iconoclastic Potter." Since the original 1967 BBC "Wednesday Play" production of PotterÕs "Message for Posterity" became a lost work, it survives only as a script. The BBC2 revival (for the "Performance" series of plays by major dramatists), featuring an introduction by Brian Walden (father of cast member Ben Walden), aired 29 October 1994, four-and-a-half months after Potter's death, with the American television premiere four years later (March-April 1998) on Ovation, the Arts Network. Potter was inspired by an incident in the life of Sir Winston Churchill, whose portrait was commissioned by the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the occasion of Churchill's 80th birthday. When it was presented to him at a 30 November 1954 Westminster Hall ceremony, Churchill remarked, "The portrait is a remarkable example of modern art. It certainly combines force and candour." In truth, Churchill hated the finished painting by Graham Sutherland (1903-1980), claiming "it makes me look half-witted," and it was never exhibited in public. A year later, Mrs. Churchill had the painting destroyed. Potter used this situation as a springboard for a drama symbolizing the power of the British Establishment to crush any challenge to its authority. In Potter's play, political radical James Player is commissioned by the House of Commons to paint Conservative statesman Sir David Browning. When the left-wing Player, who despises all that Browning represents, arrives at the former Prime Minister's country estate, the two have a confrontational clash of values and politics. Player intends to depict "the grotesque evil of power," so the portrait will serve as revenge for Browning's actions during the 1926 General Strike. Unable to forgive Browning for breaking up a miners' meeting by sending troops into "some common ground in the middle of the Forest of Dean," Player views his canvas as "a final judgment, the long-postponed moment of reckoning, the just revenge of a long-abused people." When Browning drifts into sleep, Player props him up and continues to paint, but Player suddenly becomes enraged "as if possessed by a demon," running about and smashing objects, proclaiming, "I'll 1926 you, you bastard." After Player is led away, Browning is told by his private secretary and granddaughter that no one will ever see the painting and that Player "won't trouble us again." Browning responds, "We always win in the end... Always win... in the end."

Season 4, Episode 2: Measure for Measure

5 November 1994
Modern dress version of Shakespeare's "problem comedy" emphasizing the darker elements of the play and eliminating most of the humor, as Claudio is dragged to the police station on charges of fornication, and given a rectal exam in front of a window.

Season 4, Episode 3: The Deep Blue Sea

12 November 1994

Season 4, Episode 4: A Summer Day's Dream

26 November 1994
An adaptation of JB Priestly's play set in a post-apocalyptic 1975.

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Season 5

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Season 5, Episode 1: Shadow of a Gunman

7 October 1995
The first part of O'Casey's "The Dublin Trilogy". Set in 1920, as the War of Independence rages, "Shadow of a Gunman" is the story of two young men, Donald & Seamus who share a flat in Dublin.

Season 5, Episode 2: The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd

14 October 1995

Season 5, Episode 3: Landscape

21 October 1995

Season 5, Episode 4: Bed

14 August 1995
Surreal drama about seven old people living in the same bed.

Season 5, Episode 5: Henry IV

28 October 1995

Season 5, Episode 6: After Miss Julie

4 November 1995

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Unknown Season

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King Lear

21 March 1998
King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear's loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.