Or….What’s It All About, Steve?
I won’t pretend to know a great deal about Stephen Poliakoff. I’m writing this with the Stephen Poliakoff entry in Wikipedia open but unread, trying to capture some original thoughts before I start accumulating the conventional wisdom.
Over the past week I’ve watched three of the writer/diretor’s TV specials – Joe’s Palace, A Real Summer and Capturing Mary. And previously I’ve watched Friends and Crocodiles and Gideon’s Daughter. All these dramas are highly, no extremely, watchable. The dialogue draws you in with its natural rhythm. It’s one of the few things left completely unstylized. Everything else, though, I would expect to be called hyperreal, or stagey. Magnifient sets, invariably featuring a rambling, expensive house, ultra modern office architecture or the kind of upper ehelon, under-populated London streets usually featured in Richard Curtis films. The music is Michael Nyman-esque insistent strings and swells of orchestra to accompany dramatic moments.
And what moments! What drama! Everything in a Poliakoff is swollen and tense with meaning. Everything resembles an allegory, recognisable tricks and traits beg to be deciphered whilst never quite revealing their authenticity or meaning. A classic trademark of his is the incongruous visual non sequitur – ballroom dancing in the middle of a wintry London park; the owner of Joe’s palace requesting he go to the deli for a platter of meat. Characters recur across different dramas, sometimes as a narrator, sometimes a minor part. An interesting ploy, but the connections are so loose as to be meaningless. Or are they? All these programs thread together different plotlines, which rise and fall within themselves. Some go nowhere and peter out. Some become the main narrative. You never know whether what you’re watching is important or another folly. It makes for addictive television viewing – and this is undoubtedly televisioin drama; I cannot imagine it working in any other medium – but also frustrating viewing.
Poliakoffs eye for sumptuous detail, scenes of privileged life, and impressive casting make these dramas enthralling. But there is a feeling as the credits roll that you have been the subject of a master playwrite’s clever trick – there’s too much life and not enough drama. He’s invented a glittering world and put it before you, and the lack of a driving narrative is disguised by the richness of everything else that is there.
With his own set of motifs, reurring themes, rich visuals and reprised characters, I might compare Poliakoff to that other arch obfuscator David Lynch. Poliakoffian doesn’t have the same great adjetive ring as Lynchian, which has almost become a lazy shorthand for presumed surreality. But he is one of the most distinctive writers we have, and everything I have seen by him so far exudes an atmosphere all of its own, and one that draws all heads toward it as it plays out in the corner of the room. Is he revealing any great truths? It may take me some time to work that one out. What a luxury to have the support as a writer to be able to produce this stuff, and that people actually want the time and space to let it stew. Although if he does have anything of any import to say, is a brilliantly executed but admittedly minority drama on television the best place to say it. I suppose like Dennis Potter he wants to make great drama, and in that, like Potter, he succeeds very well indeed.
Two things really stood out in the recent three programs. Ruth Wilson, who plays the young Mary in A Real Summer and Capturing Mary, is astonishing. By turns mature, strong willed, vulnerable, funny and scared, she is a magnifient actor, and she has a magnetic, characterful face. And David Walliams as Greville, a man in the inner circle of the privileged literati, whose looming, ominous presence is palpable. He may or may not be exerting a malign influence over Mary’s professional career, and whether he is there or not he can be felt in every scene like an undercurrent.
Related reading:
AA Gill’s view – “a collection of farts and burps signifying something that didn’t agree with [Poliakoff] at breakfast”
