 BILL BRAY introduces a dramatist who prefers the shadows
Stephen Poliakoff began writing plays at school and has never stopped. He attracted attention from the start and the play, Granny, written while he was still at Westminster School was reviewed in the national press in 1969. Cambridge University followed but Poliakoff was too busy pursuing a dramatist's career to complete his studies. He was writer-in-residence with the National Theatre at the age of 24. Despite this early success he has managed to avoid the public eye, not courting self-publicity, rather directing attention to his work.
The GWT presented his City Sugar in 1981 following its first performance in 1975 at the Bush Theatre with a West End transfer and a production in New York. Since then he has focussed on television and films for his dramatic writing with only occasional pieces for the stage. He has added directing for film and TV to his accomplishments.
His Russian-Jewish background has given much material for his work as in Breaking The Silence which was written for the stage and first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 1984. It relates to experiences of his grandfather at the time of the Russian revolution. Poliakoff does not show great revolutionary events but the impact of the times on an inventor who is forced to comply with the conditions imposed by the new rulers. It is not overtly a political play but demonstrates how great political changes affect the lives of ordinary people. Perhaps it is inaccurate to describe Poliakoff's family as "ordinary people" because the inventor is far from ordinary and we see remarkable happenings dealt with by an extraordinary group of people. To suggest that the play has the air of Ripley's Believe It Or Not London museum of freaks and oddities is an exaggeration. However, although you might well question its credibility, it is rooted in real experience.
Poliakoff's favoured medium is television and some of his notable TV plays have been Caught On A Train, starring Peggy Ashcroft (1984) , Shooting The Past, with Lindsay Duncan and Timothy Spall (1999), The Lost Prince (2003) and, more recently, Friends and Crocodiles (2006) and in 2007 Joe's Palace, starring Michael Gambon, and Capturing Mary, with Maggie Smith and David Walliams. The recent plays were a conscious effort on Poliakoff's part to revive the long lost practice of the single play on BBC TV with echoes of Play For Today recalling the great days of television drama. It seems to have been a lost cause.
Breaking the Silence is an opportunity to experience the world of Stephen Poliakoff. Don't miss it.
MARGARET YOUNG, director, introduces the play
Who Do You Think You Are? - that popular BBC TV programme, which digs up a celebrity's ancestral roots, has traced a number of family trees going back to central and eastern Europe. Survivors of the Holocaust or émigrés from the Russian revolution or 19th and 20th century progroms have bequeathed us present-day artists, actors or scientists. Stephen Poliakoff is a member of this talented generation.
In 1924, with Stalin's purging of "class enemies", following the death of Lenin, Poliakoff's inventor grandfather was forced to leave Russia. With his family he settled in England. Here he did pioneering work on electronic devices and custom-built a hearing aid for Winston Churchill. His children, apart from Stephen, are all academics.
Breaking The Silence is the story of how the Poliakoff's (named Pesiakoff's in the play) managed to survive four years of revolutionary turmoil. Basically they were cocooned from the worst of it by living on a train, shunting up and down the northern territories. Of course, the author has taken liberties with the facts in order to create an entertaining drama. There's no harm in that. A comedy set in times of chaos is bound never to be far removed from absurdity and tragedy. |
