"Unnatural Pursuits" is such a delicious send-up of theater life, you'll recognize its rightness even if all you know about theater life comes from "Pursuits." Based on a Simon Gray play, this joint A&E/BBC production stars Alan Bates as Hamish Partt, a British playwright haplessly trying to improve his work, even as he destroys himself in the process. In heavier hands, this would be a voyage of self-discovery; here, Bates knows himself all too well from the start. We know him too, but we're charmed anyway.
"Pursuits" follows Partt as he follows his play from London to Los Angeles, Dallas and New York, bombarded by demons internal and external. In London, the demon is Partt's supercilious rival playwright. It's a stock character, given new dimensions by Richard Wilson.
In Los Angeles, the demon is a hyperbolic local director. "This is what I went to Yale Drama School for, to work on a play like this," he burbles, just before he decimates it. Bob Balaban invests the character with the same dweebish malice he brought to "Seinfeld," playing a TV network president. He's great.
In Dallas, the demon is Dallas. Partt has had alcoholic hallucinations already. Here, the whole city seems to be one. From the "Little People's convention" in his glass-and-steel hotel to a sex-starved local theater critic, it's so over the top that the most sensitive Texan will enjoy the joke.
Everywhere, the demon is rum (and its cousins Scotch and champagne). "You don't need inspiration for plays," Partt growls in a low moment. "You don't need anything for plays but a bottle of Glenfiddich and a carton of cigarettes." Plus nicotine gum for insurance.
In one priceless aside, Partt's matronly airplane seatmate gets a look at his chemical props and crutches, picks up her copy of "Diary of a Country Vicar," and takes off. In another, actors attack the playwright. "He's turning us into passive smokers," they whine. "AND passive drinkers!"
Imagine an American network movie dealing with this character. Think where the audience's sympathies would be directed, how the addict would achieve self-esteem, who would play the requisite social worker. Then watch "Pursuits," and know that some still value wit over wellness."

Susan Stewart, The Detroit Free Press, 23 January 1994

In the Unnatural Pursuits mini-series Bates plays writer Hamish Partt, whose finances diminish as his alcohol intake increases during the trauma of having a new play performed in London, Los Angeles, Dallas and New York.
"It's loosely based on Simon Gray himself," says Bates. "I've always loved playing his stuff [Butley, Otherwise Engaged, among others] and relish his words. Somehow you can just eat them.
"Partt watches his life crumbling and even relishes it. However much of a wreck he is himself, he sees everyone around him incredibly sanely and with affection. He understands ego, paranoia, the nonsense of everything. He's constantly coming up against other people's obsessions and, at the same time, he's smoking and drinking himself into a rather bad condition.
"I've known people like that, and you can see how near we all are to a similar sort of edge. There's a real mixture of the clown and despair in one." He paused, grinned, and added: "Well, we're all clowns, aren't we?"

New York City. It is not fair. Alan Bates, perhaps the greatest living British actor, has just finished 12 hours' filming in the muggy streets of Manhattan, and he looks like he's ready for another 12. Bates is starring in Simon Gray's "Unnatural Pursuits," [at the time of this article, called "With Two Lumps of Ice" -ed.] a dark comedy about the misadventures of Hamish Partt, a British playwright who comes to America obsessed with staging his play "properly."
"It is the journey of an obsessed author, working through obsessed producers, obsessed directors, obsessed actors, and finally ending up with something that is worth seeing and that people want to see," Bates said.
The BBC-produced film - a three-parter - is on a 60-day production schedule, shooting scenes in London, Los Angeles and Dallas as well as New York. "It's relentless," Bates acknowledges. "The schedule is 12 hours a day six days a week, and I'm in everything. But fortunately it's such a light-hearted, affectionate piece - I mean, it's dark as well - but the way he tells it is light and funny."
Bates admits a bias for Gray's works, having acted in seven of his plays and films: "So he kind of likes me, I think." He laughs. The saturnine grin lights up. The green eyes blaze under the crown of silver-shot brown curls. Women talk distractedly at neighboring tables, looking everywhere else in the room.
Partt's crisis begins when his new play fizzles at a fringe theater in London. He decides to take it to an Actors' Equity "waiver house" in Los Angeles. "He's come unsuitably dressed, he's come ill-equipped, he's come under a rather idealistic idea that it's all going to be idealistically done," Bates said.
Partt, crushed in the collision of egos, indulges his taste for tumbler after tumbler of single malt Scotch whisky with two you-know-whats. "He's the kind of drinker who doesn't know he's on the verge of alcoholism," Bates said. "It stimulates him. It doesn't halt any of his creative processes. He doesn't realize until it gets very dangerous that he's got to do something about it. He starts to hallucinate, and he wonders why."
Partt's boozing is starting to annoy, then, when he next is invited to a "civic theater" production of his play as a guest of the city of Dallas. He very nearly is run out of town. His deterioration continues apace when, miraculously, he's invited to do his play in New York. He accepts on the condition that he gets to direct.
"The dark side of it just keeps shooting through it," Bates said. "Suddenly, when you're laughing away there, you get someone having a hallucination or a drunken fit or a hideous, appalling tragic incident. It's not just the observer or the audience who can find it funny. The character's sort of oddly looking at himself, laughing at himself, watching his own frustrations and paranoia and finding them hideously funny." he said. "That's the pleasure of playing him. He can see his own condition as he lives it through, which is a great, extra cake for the actor, I think. You're not just playing someone who people observe to be in a certain condition, you're observing him observing himself in a certain condition."
After "Two Lumps" and its post-production concludes, Bates plans to begin rehearsals in London in October on a David Storey play scheduled for a three-month run at the National Theatre. "I haven't been onstage for two or three years," Bates said, "and it's high time I was in the theater - for my own sake, if not for anybody else's."

Scott Williams, Associated Press, 5 August 1992

Alan's wife Victoria died during the filming of "Unnaatural Pursuits," undone by the loss of one of their sons two years before. Alan kept working: "She certainly wouldn't have wanted me to stop. When my son died, I found work a great refuge. I did five projects in a row until I was exhausted."
A journalist writing about Alan in "W" notes the irony that he is working on a comedy: "Between shots he slumps into a chair, apparently exhausted, putting his face in his hands. After the miniseries is completed, Bates adds, he is taking a two-month break. 'I shall just go into the country and deal with everything,' he says."