TV REVIEWS : Unique Drama Style in ‘2 Monologues’

“2 Monologues” (on “Masterpiece Theatre” Sunday, at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24) is a unique form of television drama in which a solitary character, alone at home in a confiding mood, talks directly to the camera.

The format, pioneered by actor-playwright Alan Bennett in the earlier BBC “Talking Heads” series, creates a highly intimate tone in which your imagination fills in the story--rather like a priest might feel at a startling confessional.

In the first dramatic monologue, writer-director Jack Emery’s “In My Defence,” a young woman sits before a tape recorder explaining, in mesmerizing detail, why and how she placed a plastic bag over the head of her terminally ill mother and helped kill her.

Based on the ordeal of Phillpa Monaghan, a 32-year-old Welsh woman accused of murder in 1989 and later given a compassionate sentence of two years probation, the performance is so convincing that it’s almost a jolt to realize that it’s an actress (the compelling Saskia Reeves) playing a woman she has never met.

For those who support euthanasia or voted this week for the physician-assisted death measure, Proposition 161 (which failed), this personal account, while entirely non-judgmental, is likely to linger uncomfortably in your imagination.

The second monologue, “A Chip in the Sugar,” written and acted by Alan Bennett, was seen (and reviewed) last year. Bennett, reverting to his native Yorkshire accent, plays a mildly balmy middle-aged man living with his mother and lamentably tied to her apron strings. He describes, with growing alarm, how his mother falls for a slick suitor in a rich performance that, again, transforms a “talking head” into a fountain of life.