Awakenings on stage and screen

A further, but still interim, post arising from the awakenings of references 1 and 2.

Sacks was clearly very taken with, fascinated by, all the stage and screen adaptations of his book. A fascination described in the appendix added to my edition of the book. He seems to have coped with having become a media person in his own right, to have managed to carry on being a doctor at the same time.

And he was pleased to find that his patients – known as the enkies for the encephalitis which had felled them – were up for it too. They seemed to like people taking an interest in them. And it looks as if, for a while at least, they got a lot of it. They were happy to participate in the documentary of 1974 at reference 9.

Eight years later in 1982, we have the play ‘A kind of Alaska’ by Pinter, with Sacks being very surprised at how well Harold Pinter, and his star Judi Dench, managed to portray the sort of thing he described in his vignettes, without ever having had any contact with the subject matter or the subjects beforehand. A play which put to rest his reservations about anyone making a play out of his book.

Then in 1987 there was a radio version of the book, with Sacks playing himself. Another successful adaptation, with his interactions with the actors playing the patients being another learning experience for Sacks. Presumably the radio concentrated on the awakening side of things – the waking up after having been sort of asleep for twenty or thirty years – rather than what came afterwards.

Later in the same year the work on the film of the book – reference 3 - got underway, with Sacks being very impressed by de Niro’s serious preparation for his role as a post-encephalitic patient. Method acting, big time. And Sacks was very impressed with the result – with de Niro managing to pull off the further trick of the patients with whom he spent time both liking him and what he was doing. Another learning experience being that while Sacks might have been technical consultant, he had to take a back seat and let the film people create their version of the story, the story seen through their eyes rather than through his. Different, but equally valid.

After which Sacks found it slightly odd being around Robin Williams who was clearly doing the same sort of job on him as de Niro had been doing on the patients, one of whom he was to be. That is to say, sucking in, sucking out of them, all he needed to know about them in order to project his version of one of them onto the silver screen. I think I would find it rather odd too.

Sacks was fascinated by watching an actor working his way into a role, learning how to be the person being portrayed, in this case learning to be a patient with a range of Parkinsonian symptoms, tics and mannerisms. He noticed that sometimes the actors had trouble turning off, that their role was leaking into their own lives. And he was tempted to ask de Niro if he could stick a recording cap on his head and take an EEG of him while he was acting out a very convincing oculogyric fit, to see what impact acting the thing had on the inner workings. Were they anything like the inner working of someone actually having such a fit? With such a fit involving the eyes becoming locked in a far up direction and the neck often being severely twisted. See reference 8 for a description of one.

I associated to Lawrence Oliver, who, when asked about method acting, said something to the effect that you could always try acting. But what did he bring, for example, to his portrayal of Richard III making smart remarks about horses on the field of Bosworth (Act V, Scene IV, line 7)? He knew that being a king was to turn out a performance, but what did he know about the grim realities of fifteen century battlefields? Was his actorly intuition about how humans behave enough? And how would he have managed with the enkies?

While Sacks seemed to feel that these method actors, with their mimetic skills, were able to learn and portray stuff about his patients which was new. They had an impressive ability to work their way into replicating all the strange physical behaviours of these patients. They had a new way of looking at them, different but equally valid to what Sacks himself, the neurological doctor, did.

One of the original patients, Lillian Tighe, gets to play herself in both the 1974 documentary and the 1991 film, and although she fell out of the latter on the cutting room floor she did earn a ‘special thanks’ at the end of the IMDB credits: an inspiration to everybody else concerned and she is snapped with Sacks above. At the very end of the book, on the last page before the glossary, she turns up on the set to do her scene with de Niro and puts her seal of approval on the proceedings. The film was going to be OK; OK in itself and OK with the enkies.

Footnotes

Sacks also found time to take in a performance of the play called ‘Wings’ (reference 6) about a lady recovering from a stroke, but did not find this terribly convincing (page 378, note 171).

I associate to Simenon’s story of waking up from a stroke, ‘Les Anneaux de Bicêtre’, not quite the same thing as between stroke and waking up, there is nothing, while Sacks’ patients have been awake, after a fashion. See reference 4.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-parable.html.

Reference 2: Awakenings - Oliver Sacks – 1973. Picador edition of 2012.

Reference 3: Awakenings – Robert de Niro, Robin Williams – 1991.

Reference 4: Les Anneaux de Bicêtre – Simenon – 1963. First noticed by me at reference 5 following.

Reference 5: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=Double+Georges.

Reference 6: Wings – Arthur Kopit – 1978. First noticed my me at reference 7 following.

Reference 7: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/09/wings.html.

Reference 8: Delayed Onset of Oculogyric Crisis and Torticollis with Intramuscular Haloperidol - Stanford S Jhee, Victoria Zarotsky, Stephen M Mohaupt, Cynthia L Yones, and Steve J Sims - 2003. It seems these crises are reasonably common side effects of the use of certain psycho-active drugs.

Reference 9: Awakenings - Duncan Dallas for Yorkshire Television – 1974.

Reference 10: https://neurovision.org.uk/videos/awakenings-trailer/. Free trailer for reference 9. Seemingly available for streaming but not for buying.

Reference 11: https://www.oliversacks.com/. The site for the Oliver Sacks foundation. Whom I thank for use of their picture.