Peter Terson

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Terson, Peter (1932– ), English dramatist, whose first play to be produced, A Night to Make Angels Weep (1964), was performed at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent (see NEW VICTORIA THEATRE), where he was resident dramatist for 18 months, and for which he was ultimately to write 22 plays. It was followed by The Mighty Reservoy (also 1964), All Honour Mr Todd, and I'm in Charge of These Ruins (both 1966). Other works for Stoke were Mooney and his Caravans (1967) and a dramatization of Clayhanger staged in honour of Arnold Bennett's centenary (also in 1967), in which Terson collaborated with Joyce Cheeseman. In the same year he began a long association with the National Youth Theatre with Zigger-Zagger, his best-known play, about a football fan. From then onwards he wrote a play for the NYT almost every year, all of them relating to young people and their problems. They include The Apprentices (1968), Fuzz! (1969), Good Lads at Heart (1971; staged by the NYT in New York in 1979), and Geordie's March (1973). Among later subjects were life in a hotel (The Bread and Butter Trade, 1976), relationships between parents and children (Family Ties, 1977), an unemployed youth who joins the National Front (England My Own, 1978), and a young soldier who tries to get out of the army (The Ticket, 1980). Terson continued to write plays for the Victoria Theatre, such as The Adventures of Gervaise Becket; or, The Man Who Changed Places (1969), and The Pied Piper (1980), both for children; the semi-documentary The 1861 Whitby Lifeboat Disaster (1970); an adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1972); and Aesop's Fables (1983), with music. He also wrote plays for other theatres, and Strippers (1985), in which a woman becomes a stripper when her husband loses his job, was staged in the West End. Terson has been widely praised for his honesty and directness, and has even been compared to Chekhov. His plays for the NYT were thematic and extensively reworked in rehearsal, whereas his plays for the Victoria Theatre and elsewhere were more personal and subject only to the normal rehearsal adjustments. He works at great speed, writing a play in two weeks and sometimes in as little as three days.

Terson, Peter, the pseudonym of Peter Patterson (1932– ), playwright, born in Newcastle upon Tyne; he was associated with the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, with its tradition of social documentary and theatre-in-the-round, then with the National Youth Theatre, where he excelled in writing for large casts. His works include Mooney and His Caravans (TV 1966), about an inadequate young couple victimized by the owner of a caravan site; Zigger Zagger (1967), about a football fan and the drama of the football terraces; Good Lads at Heart (1971), set in a Borstal; Geordie's March (1979); and Strippers (1984), about a group of working-class women forced to take up stripping to support themselves.