Hilary Lloyd’s Very High Frequency is a strange encounter between the artist and the late British television playwright Dennis Potter, who died from cancer aged 59 in 1994. Lloyd approaches her subject obliquely, via a complex mise-en-scène in the semi-darkened main gallery. There are screens all round. Some you can sit at, others are hung mid-air from wires or mounted on stands or fixed to the walls. High above, a mirror ball twirls, dimly reflected in a shiny black-painted slab that sits low on the floor in front of a translucent hanging curtain. It is a room of interruptions and diversions. What’s that black slab about? A reference to the seams of coal in Potter’s birthplace in the Forest of Dean on the border between England and Wales? I think of the glossy black of a grand piano, and a dance-orchestra backing Al Bowlly, Potter’s favourite 1930s crooner. Does the slab intimate a darkness haunting Potter’s life and work? Moving around is a constant negotiation. Potter’s past collaborators appear and disappear, re-enact moments from his work, reminisce and get sidetracked.
Annotated pages of his scripts, not always easy to read, appear on a screen high above our heads. On another, the Berry Hill Silver Band (in which the youthful Potter once played) practise As Time Goes By. On another screen, sitting at home and speaking with Lloyd, the now 85-year-old broadcaster and author Melvyn Bragg remembers his famous last television interview with Potter in 1994, and gets waylaid by a memory of a New York sidewalk encounter with Lauren Bacall. High Frequency is full of delays and diversions.
