Produced as a teleplay for a British anthology series which clocked in at just a little over an hour, Dennis Potter’s Schmoedipus is essentially a one-act play. Unlike the masterpieces of Potter’s career, it is not a story that is almost dependent upon the medium of cinema to really pull things off. While it is true Pennies from Heaven and even The Singing Detective could be effectively be reproduced on Broadway, it almost physically induces a cringe to imagine a local theater trying to replicate this feat. On the other hand—concerns over content aside—there is absolutely no reason that Schmoedipus couldn’t be mounted as a production by any theater in America.
It is a chamber drama specifically focusing on three characters: a husband, his wife and the child she was forced to abandon after a teenage birth who has tracked her down as an adult.
Simple enough and seemingly not really enough raw material to create a drama that is “about” many things. Except that the story just outlined above merely describes the action. It does not describe the details and it is in the details that Schmoedipus lives. These details range from the placement in his heart that the husband in train set over the love he feels for his wife to the question of whether the adult son actually exists. Not whether he is really who he says he is, but whether he is ever really more than a figment of the wife’s imagination.
As the title indicates, repressive sexuality is certainly at the forefront of the story’s thematic exploration. In reality, however, Schmoedipus is a Freudian stew in which the Oedipal complex is merely the meat surrounded by generous helpings of equally tasty side vegetables in the form of sublimation, denial, transference, wish-fulfilment, defense mechanisms and psychodrama. The point being there is a whole lot going on this thing and it is exceedingly difficult to narrow it down to just one overall all-encompassing assertion. Except for the one thing that unifies all the characters and which seems to be the primary message the story seeks to deliver.
The husband, the wife and the adult son come to reclaim his childhood all testify to the fact that many—probably most—never truly escape childhood. The son is this ideal made manifest in the way he reverts to infantile behavior (even while engaging in Oedipal undertones.) The husband escapes into the love of his childhood as a defense mechanism against a trouble marriage to a woman suffering some sort of mental illness resulting from childhood trauma. That manifestation of mental illness is the wife’s version of playing with trains. None—or, at best, a few lucky and probably a lot more unlucky ones—never fully grow up out of childhood and into adulthood. Something is always present to hold us back and either occasionally or as a regular part of our existence that something has the power to jerk us back from total maturity and throw us right into the anxieties of our childhood. Potter’s story is a presentation of this reality that who we are as adults is always accompanied by the shadow of childhood.
Just like Freud’s theories claimed.
