Peter Terson 1932-2021

Farewell my dear friend

 .
Peter Terson (Patterson) 'Pete' died in the early hours of April 8th aged 89. He had been  living with Parkinson's disease for the last few years, stoic and good natured throughout and supported by his wife Shelia, who has been his rock through their 66 year marriage. Shelia had asked me to write an obituary for their local paper The Ross Gazette in Ross on Wye (See below) but I wanted to add some more reflections on his life and my memories of him. i first met Pete in 1985 at a weekend writers retreat in Monkton Wilde, Dorset that I had set up so I could meet writers and enthuse them about the community play genre. Peter Terson, David Cregan, Nick Darke were among them. I have to confess I was daunted by Pete's energy and frankness, he was a heavy cider drinker at the time and would disappear from the conference with Nick and they would come back somewhat paralytic.  As a result I was somewhat nervous and it took five years to invite him to write a play for Bradford on Avon "Under the Fish"and Over The Water (1990) . I then collaborated with him in developing two community operas in Southborough "Have you seen this Girl" (1991) and "Twin Oaks"  which were also performed in Lambersart and Lille in France with an Anglo French Cast, directed by Mark Dornford May. I then commissioned him for a second large scale promenade play in 1999, "The Sailors Horse" (Minehead and Watchet). Pete was the most diligent in meeting the community' face to face. These plays can take up to two years to develop. Pete not only made flash visits, the more common approach by busy writers committed to other projects at the same time, he would come and live or holiday in the town with Shelia. As a director I never worked harder having to keep up with Peter. In Minehead he wanted to know about Butlins, both as a holiday maker and behind the scenes, so he insisted I organise a week end stay. We followed the day in the life of a Bluecoat, and the holiday maker, We sang Karaoke, joined a quiz  team and played crazy golf with a family, He'd given up drink by then thankfully though we sat in the bars in order to meet the punters and drank juices. Peter watched, listened and most particularly picked up the rhythms, accents, turns-of-phrase of local people. He incorporated these experiences and their personal stories into the play..
The play scripts emerged over the weeks, inspired by events of the previous day or some newly discovered research. Odd scenes would arrive in no particular order. Eventually the full script would arrive in the post. Typed on an old Olivetti typewriter with an old ribbon on various lined, plain yellowing paper or opened envelopes pinned and sellotaped together. There were amicable exchanges of ideas to get to a rehearsal draft, I was to learn that Pete didn't consider a script finished till the show was over. He attended many more rehearsals than any writer and sat on the edge, often with a pile of script papers and listen and watch, seldom interfering. One regular thing he did do ,however ,when a community actor came out with a line in his or her own natural framing, because he or she wasn't yet word perfect, Pete would call out something like "that's not it... "that's not what I wrote" followed by  "but. it's better, say it like that."  He recognised it sat more comfortably with the actors vernacular, and was therefore more truthful..

,Over the years Pete, Shelia, my wife Bec and I holidayed together, and built a long and lasting friendship. Pete regularly made spontaneous phone calls to ask if I knew some obscure fact about whatever subject he was writing about or a word he was challenging Shelia on over a game of scrabble.  I rarely knew the answer, so have no idea why he persisted in calling. He was a sore loser at scrabble and an even worse winner, He would remind you many times over the day that he was  "two games ahead."  Bec eventually refused to play with the old curmudgeon. Even when you weren't together  you were not out of the firing line. A sketch cartoon would arrive in the post with a version of himself or myself along with some satirical comment  He gave me a copy of Zigger Zagger as a prize for losing a few scrabble games in a row, with this drawing inscribed on the inner cover. ​

`I don't believe in the latter years that Peter Terson got the credit he deserved, Age did not weary him nor did his talent diminish. He was undoubtably one of great playwriting talents of his age. In a self written short biography he wrote that the sixties and seventies were his 'glorious days' a period in which he wrote  and had produced somewhere in the region of eighty plays for television, radio and the theatre. He went on to say "but I'm not dead yet and just coming up to my peak `~~(confidence and mad optimism  is all to the playwright.) that was Peter Terson to the last, until Parkinson disease robbed him of the capacity to write. Peter Terson's plays are social dramas as relevant today as ever they were. It is beholden on the theatre and those who can to resurrect past plays and produce the more recent ones; we still have a lot to learn from him. He should be as honoured as a dramatist equal to Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, especially as he never abandoned his working class roots.

​OBITUARY 
PETER TERSON (1932-2021)

​The television, radio and stage playwright Peter Terson, died on 8th April 2021, aged 89. He lived in Western Grove Ross on Wye.  Peter wrote a noted series of BBC Plays for Today about three Yorkshire miners (their leader played by Brian Glover) who were determined to expand their cultural horizons. The scene in Shakespeare - or Bust , where they meet Janet Suzman and Richard Johnson, the leads in Antony and Cleopatra , on a canal boat on the Avon at Stratford, was shown last autumn in the BBC's celebration of the 50th anniversary of BBC ‘s Play for Today . Terson was a leading figure in the regional theatre movement of the 1960s and 1970s, writing a huge amount for the theatre-in-the-round, Victoria Theatre. Stoke-on-Trent, under its visionary director Peter Cheeseman.  His play about football hooliganism for the National Youth Theatre, Zigger Zagger, was a huge success when premiered and has been frequently revived and produced internationally. The successful west end play Strippers, about redundant workers' wives resorting to striptease, as an alternative income was a precursor of The Full Monty by thirteen years. Overall, Terson had over 80 plays performed on stage, television and radio.
 
Born Peter Patterson on February 24, 1932, in Tyneside England; the son of a joiner, Peter Patterson and Jane, who he described as a mother worn out with ‘work and worry. He grew up in a world of empty shipyards and dole queues, left school when he was fifteen and worked in a drawing office, attending Newcastle-upon-Tyne Technical College. After national service in the RAF (1950-52), where he trained to be a ground wireless mechanic, he trained as a teacher at Redland Training College, Bristol (1952-54), where he met and married Sheila Bailey, on May 25, 1955. They had three children: Bruce, (now deceased) Neil, and Janie. He then spent ten years as a teacher of physical education, without ever mastering the rules of basketball. During his teaching years he wrote plays and had “enough rejection slips to paper the wall”.
 
Eventually Terson sent A Night to Make the Angels Weep to Peter Cheeseman, director of the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent, an in-the-round Theatre committed to regionalism. He was then nominated to become resident playwright and wrote them sixteen plays over the next ten years that included The Mighty Reservoy (1964), I’m in Charge of These Ruins (1966), The Knotty (1970), and The 1861 Whitby Lifeboat Disaster (1971), as well as a number of adaptations.  While still writing for Stoke, The National Youth Theatre director, Michael Croft, commissioned him to write Zigger Zagger. Other plays followed including The Apprentices (1968), The Fuzz (1969) and Good Lads at Heart (1972).  He wrote several plays for children including a musical version of Aesop's Fables at Stoke, focussing on the slave Aesop’s quest for freedom.

Terson's work for BBC televisions Play for Today series, included a noted trilogy of plays The Fishing Party (1972) Shakespeare or Bust and Three for the Fancy  (1973). His other television work included an adaptation of his stage play Mooney and His Caravans (1966), The Heroism of Thomas Chadwick (1967), The Last Train through the Harecastle Tunnel (1969) and The Dividing Fence (1972), Put Out to Grass (1979) and Altantis (1983). His play Strippers was produced by the Newcastle Playhouse in 1984, and then at the Phoenix Theatre in the West End the following year.  His radio plays included Play Soft, Then Attack (1978), The First Flame (1980), The Overnight Man (1982), the documentary The Romany Trip (1983), and Tales My Father Taught Me (1990), starring John Gielgud. Terson was co-winner (with Peter Nichols) of the Arts Council’s John Whiting Award in 1967, and he won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award for best radio play in 1972.
Terson’s influence in British regional theatre has been considerable, and more than any other contemporary dramatist he carries forward the ideas of social drama. In an essay about Terson in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gillette Elvgren compared the playwright to such luminaries as Arnold Wesker, John Osborne, and Harold Pinter, who also came from Britain's working class. But unlike some works of these playwrights, his own plays continue to reflect and draw sustenance from this heritage. Terson imbues his characters with a kind of colloquial relevance and delightful eccentricity that never loses touch with the sources of work and class from which the writer sprang.
 
Personal Reflection from Jon Oram
In the 1990s Peter turned to writing community plays, collaborating with me as Artistic Director of Colway Theatre, now Claque Theatre, on Under The Fish And Over The Water (Bradford on Avon, 1990) directed by Mark Dornford May, and The Sailor's Horse (Minehead, 1999) which I directed. There were no pretensions about Peter, in finding the play he was diligent in his research and, more significantly, connecting with the community he was writing for; he steeped himself in their lives, lived among them, frequented their places of work, and leisure. He listened to people, picked up the rhythms, and manner of their speech. Pater sat in rehearsals and would regularly change the script to suit the nature of a particular actor. He incorporated others’ ideas readily, a script was not finished till the show was over. This flexibility went hand in hand with being a tough defender of the play as a work of art, in the service of the community.
In September 2020, during a brief period of respite from the covid lockdown, my wife and I were able to take Peter and Shelia to a revival of Mooney And His Caravans at the Malvern Theatre. They treated him like a member of theatre royalty that he rightly deserved. It was his last visit to a theatre in a long and distinguished career.
Peter is survived by his wife Shelia, his children Neil and Janie, his grandchildren Tom, Heather, Sean, Sophie and Dominic and by his great granddaughter Keya
                                                                                                                                   Jon Oram