Christopher Morahan & Dennis Potter – ITV Saturday Night Theatre: Lay Down Your Arms (1970)
As with LIPSTICK ON YOUR COLLAR, the later re-working of this play, most of the action is set within the 1956 War Office in the midst of the Cold War and just prior to and contemporaneous with the Suez Crisis. Private Robert Hawk is the newly-arrived Russian language clerk. He is the son of a Yorkshire coalminer and a graduate of grammar school and of Oxford. He is doing his two years of national service. His job at the War Office is to assist the MI3 section in the translation of intercepted Russian documents on troop movements. Hawk is caught between his own working class roots and the upper middle class values and behaviours of the officers he works with. They mock him for his background, his immaturity and his intellectualism. He is also caught between his almost adolescent romantic idealisation of women as he sees them portrayed, for example, in his visit to the theatre to see Chekhov’s The Seagull and his equally adolescent sexual drives which lead him to consort with a prostitute for sexual release. He survives all this by inventing personalities for himself so that, in a pub and surrounded by football fanatics, he asserts his status by pretending to be (and convincing the fans that he actually is) the Russian national team goalkeeper. His deception fails when an old friend, Pete, comes into the pub and inadvertently unmasks him. To impress Pete that he holds an important position at the War Office, Hawk sets out to obtain a classified document but Pete fails to arrive at the rendezvous and the document is discarded.
Lay Down Your Arms [ITV Saturday Night Theatre] (Dennis Potter 1970).mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 12 min
Size: 1.07 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 700x576 ~> 745x576
Aspect ratio: 1.295
Frame rate: 25.000 fps
Bit rate: 1 907 kb/s
BPP: 0.189
Audio
#1: 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
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