Poppy ShakespearePoppy Shakespeare is back on again tonight at 9 on Channel 4.
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN babe Naomie Harris has swapped Hollywood glamour to play a mental patient in a new TV drama.
from THE SUN
The beauty, 31, who played scary voodoo priestess Tia Dalma in Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, swopped the glamorous Caribbean locations for a disused geriatric ward in Manchester to film Channel 4’s Poppy Shakespeare.
She plays the title role of a single mum who is a psychiatric patient in a day hospital.
Desperate to prove her sanity, she has to pretend to be mad to escape the system but as a result ends up in a squalid mental hospital.
She said: “I’ve always been drawn to roles that aren’t glamorous. I find it liberating not to have to play up to that stereotype of the beautiful woman. The way those roles are written is genuinely quite boring.”
Londoner Naomie drew on her own experience of two friends who had mental breakdowns when she was a student at Cambridge in the 1990s.
She added: “It was a very intense environment and two of my friends ended up in mental institutions having electro-shock treatment.
“It was very harrowing visiting both of them and extremely distressing. When someone loses it like they did, it’s impossible to reach them.
“I was around more as a support for their parents for whom it was incredibly hard for.
“Thankfully there was a positive outcome as one is now a teacher in a private secondary school and has just had her first child and the other one has come out of it OK as well.
“So I had some knowledge of mental institutions before I filmed this drama.”
The drama, screened on March 31, also stars Anna Maxwell Martin who won a Bafta for best actress in 2006 for Bleak House.
Naomie Harris: Harrowing scenes as Poppy Shakespeare
London-born beauty Naomie Harris is reluctantly returning to Hollywood after making a harrowing Channel 4 drama of the award-winning book Poppy Shakespeare.The reason for her departure? Lack of work.
The 31-year-old Pirates Of The Caribbean star would dearly love to remain in Britain.
But she says: “It’s easier for me to get work in the U.S. as there’s more there. It’s a big hungry machine which is constantly looking for people to feed it.”
In Poppy Shakespeare Cambridge-educated Naomie plays the title role of a single mother driven to a mental breakdown after she unwittingly becomes a psychiatric patient.
Says Naomie, who also starred in the post-apocalyptic film 28 Days Later: “We filmed the mental hospital scenes in a disused geriatric ward in Manchester.
“It was a disturbing role which left me raw. It wasn’t pleasant, so I had to unwind with a swim in the hotel pool after filming.”
Claire in the community: ‘How writing Poppy Shakespeare helped me reclaim my life’
02 Mar
Posted by admin as Profile
Clare Allan ‘wrote’ herself out of an asylum. She broke down in her 20s and spent a decade bobbing in and out of the mental health system, her head only just above water.
Her psychiatrists thought her writing was proof of delusional tendencies (”Now she thinks she’s an author!”), and it took the encouragement of an astute social worker to propel her out of hospital and on to the 2007 bestseller lists with her first novel, Poppy Shakespeare - a black comedy set in the psychiatric ward of a day hospital, which has been likened to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“What I’ve learnt from being in the system is that there’s a seed of mental illness in everyone,” says Clare, 39.
Claire Allen broke down in her 20s and spent a decade in and out of the mental health system
“I met somebody who was Read the rest of this entry »
Anna Maxwell Martin is to star in a Channel 4 comedy drama based on Clare Allan’s novel Poppy Shakespeare.
Anna Maxwell Martin (Sally Bowles) in Cabaret at the Lyric Theatre, London in 2006 Photo: Tristram Kenton
Charles Steel, the producer of The Last King of Scotland, is making the 90-minute programme through his production company Cowboy Films.
The story is about a psychiatric ward of a north London day hospital and is told through the eyes of N, played by Maxwell Martin, a 13-year veteran of the hospital who severed links with the outside years ago and has since made it her sole ambition never to be released.
Naomie Harris plays Poppy Shakespeare, a new arrival to the psychiatric ward, who insists that she is not mentally ill.
Channel 4 head of drama Liza Marshall said: “Based on the highly acclaimed and funny book drawn from author Clare Allen’s personal experiences, Poppy Shakespeare is another highly distinctive single film for Channel 4. With an Oscar-winning production team and two exceptional actresses, it’s an example of how drama and film working as one department can bring the very best film-making talent to television.”
At the end of Chapter 1 (“How it all begun”) I doubted I would last long enough to even meet the eponymous Poppy Shakespeare. The writing style, a first-person stream of consciousness courtesy of an ungrammatical, poorly-educated north Londoner, was drowning out the content. By the end of Chapter 2 (“How Tony Balaclava got a point”) I was counting the repetitions of “do you know what I’m saying” – four in four pages – and considering throwing the book across the room.
Then, unexpectedly, I stopped noticing the style, except inasmuch as it expressed how the narrator, N, saw the world. I started to care about the characters – well, frankly, I started to worry about them – and to be interested in where the plot was going. After a while I started to appreciate N’s use of language. Her turn of phrase is unusual and vivid: I liked “he’d been in so long he looked all out of date and he talked like an old-fashioned film” and “if I was you, I’d be counting my lucky chickens!”.
The story is centred on the Dorothy Fish day hospital and its mentally ill patients (“dribblers,” as N would call them). N claims proudly that she’s been a dribbler since before she was born; she is completely institutionalised and aims only to make sure that she isn’t discharged. Her fellow patients share her attitude – despite the lack of things to do and the terrible food, they can think of nothing worse than being set free.
N’s life changes in two ways at the start of this book. Firstly, new targets mean that long-term patients start to be “cured” and discharged, despite the high suicide rate among ex-patients unequipped for the outside world. And, secondly, N is asked to act as guide to new patient Poppy Shakespeare. Poppy doesn’t think she is mad. A smartly dressed single mother between jobs, she has been compelled to attend the Dorothy Fish for reasons she cannot understand. It may be an accident or an experiment, or perhaps she really has a mental illness that has previously gone undiagnosed. Her goal is to prove herself sane and escape.
The novel focuses on the relationship between N and Poppy, told from N’s point of view. N is an unreliable narrator, but Allan writes with enough skill to allow us to read between N’s lines. We’re never quite sure of the truth of events, but we can interpret the changes within the Dorothy Fish in a way that N cannot. The target-obsessed, form-filling public sector described is all too familiar, despite the heavy satire. When we learn that the Patients’ Rights advice centre is only open Wednesday and Friday mornings, and that it takes six months to get an appointment, we’re not surprised.
Poppy is faced with a reverse Catch-22 situation. In order to escape she needs to prove she is sane; but to do so she needs a mental health lawyer, who can only act for her if she is in receipt of MAD benefits – i.e. if she has convinced the government that she is mentally ill. She starts acting a part in order to obtain MAD money, but after weeks at the Dorothy Fish it becomes hard for Poppy, and the reader, to be sure where the act ends. In an environment where the accepted thing to do is be convincingly mentally ill to avoid discharge, is it possible to remain “normal”?
Allan doesn’t flesh out supporting characters, and she doesn’t provide details about either N or Poppy’s pasts. The book is very firmly set in the now; the patients rarely consider the past or dream about the future, so it is the minutiae of the daily routine that forms their lives. The staff is almost absent and it is the impersonal, bureaucratic nature of the system and the “care” the patients receive that is, ultimately, too horrific to endure. Despite this, Poppy Shakespeare is a very funny, readable and entertaining satire.
Clare Allen received a wide range of plaudits for this novel, reaching some unusual shortlists as well as the traditional literary awards’. It seems entirely appropriate for such an atypical book. Poppy Shakespeare was shortlisted for the 2007 BT Mind Book of the Year Award (“this year’s greatest literary contribution to furthering public understanding of mental distress”), the 2007 Orange Broadband award for new writers (won by Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage, of which more later) and the 2006 Guardian first book award. It was longlisted for the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for fiction. Finally, according to publisher Bloomsbury, it was shortlisted for the, umm, AIGA Award for Best Jacket (for the American paperback edition – take a look at the AIGA Design Archives. I was a little under-whelmed, although it’s nice enough).
Clare Allan won the first Orange short story prize |
An author who “wrote herself” out of a psychiatric hospital has been nominated for the Orange Prize for new writers. Clare Allan, who spent a decade in the mental health system, made the shortlist for her debut novel Poppy Shakespeare, based on her experiences.
“I had to resist the staff who treated my novelist aspirations as proof that I was delusional,” the 39-year-old said.
The other nominees for the prize, to be awarded in June, are Pakistani Roopa Farooki and Canadian Karen Connelly.
Allan, whose debut novel is billed as Catch-22 meets One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, gained an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia after leaving hospital.
She became ill after moving to London in her early twenties to pursue her dream of becoming an author, but stopped writing and eating.
‘Poor treatment’
“You are not valued as a human being, it’s not wonder hardly anyone gets better,” she said of her time in hospital.
“I believe that if you grabbed the nearest normal person off the street and put them in a psychiatric hospital, they’d be diagnosable as mad within weeks,” she added.
Channel 4 has bought the TV rights to Clare Allan’s debut novel |
Channel 4 has already bought the rights to Poppy Shakespeare, which also made the longlist for the main Orange Prize for fiction.
Farooki, who now lives in London, is shortlisted for her novel Bitter Sweets and has already completed a second book.
Connelly’s nomination is for The Lizard Cage, about a Burmese protester who is sentenced to military confinement by the country’s regime.
The Orange prizes for fiction and new writers honour female writing.
2008 This is a fan site, no official connection intended. All images used on the site are property of their owners and no infringement is intended.
Hosting by 
$20 Discount - use promocode - 20DOLLAR - Poppy Shakespeare is proudly powered by WordPress