The Fascination of Fascism: The Plays of Stephen Poliakoff

The Fascination of Fascism: The Plays of Stephen Poliakoff D. KEITH PEACOCK Born in 1952, Stephen Poliakoffhas already established for himselfan enviable reputation as a dramatist. He showed early promise. His first professionally produced play, Day With My Sister, was written while he was still at Westminster School and presented at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 197I . Five years and seven plays later, 1976 saw the transfer to the West End of his play City Sugar; its companion-piece, Hitting Town, televised by Thames Television; an award as the Evening Standard's "Most Promising Playwright"; and appointment as "Writer in Residence" at the National Theatre. The Company produced Strawberry Fields in 1977, and Britain's other prestigious "national" theatre company, the Royal Shakespeare, presented Shout Across the River in the following year. Poliakoff's most recent success has been in the medium of television drama where his screen-play Caught on a Train won the 1981 BAFTA award for the Best Single Play, as well as the Television Critics' Best Play Award, and was B.B.C. Television's entry for the Prix Italia. In spite of this success, Poliakoff has received very little critical attention beyond that of the theatrical reviews of the national press, the most substantial exception being a chapter in Oleg Kerensky's The New British Drama (1977). Given such journalistic and theatrical acclaim, the reason for this dearth of criticism is difficult to ascertain. It is not, I believe, the result of purely qualitative judgements concerning the theatrical effectiveness of Poliakoff's work. One possible explanation is that the plays can be seen to exhibit political ambiguities which held little appeal in the late 1970S in the context of a British Theatre whose politics were predominantly, even fiercely, left-wing. Poliakoff 's work has not offered itself to easy categorization. Among his young contemporaries in the theatre he has appeared to be politically unorthodox. Catherine Itzin in her book Stages in the Revolution, which chronicles political theatre in Britain since 1968, somewhat uncomfortably makes a brief reference to Poliakoff. She recognizes that his early play Heroes (1975) "was The Plays of Stephen Poliakoff 495 concerned very obviously with political issues," but concludes that "its tone was ambiguous." She is disturbed that, "though critical of fascism, the play also implied that communists were uncouth, the government a failure in creating unemployment, that workers were grubby, grubbing and morally degenerate," and that this kind of ambiguity has continued in the later plays. Itzin describes Poliakoff as "a child of the seventies," and thereby recognizes that he was reflecting something of the political and social atmosphere of his time. She is unable, however, to define his precise political stance and therefore to label him a political, and by implication, left-wing writer. Although there is certainly no reason why Poliakoff should have subscribed to the contemporary fashion for left-wing political expression in the theatre, his presentation of character and situation has often left political ambiguity where contemporary audiences expected a more positive resolution, particularly in relation to any behaviour which could possibly be labelled as "fascist." "There was, in all of Poliakoff's plays, a fascination with fascism, but also an ambiguity of attitude to its sources and its solutions," Itzin wrote. I It is upon the nature and expression of any such political ambiguity that I intend to centre my examination ofPoliakoff'splays. Recurrent and significant patterns of expression and viewpoint may already be detected, and it is becoming clear that Itzin's association of Poliakoff's work with the political and social temper of the 1970S is misleading. If Osborne and Arden have captured something of the spirit of Britain in the 1950S and early 1960s, and Bond, Brenton, Edgar and the "Fringe" political theatre groups have reflected predominant concerns of the 1970s, then partly in terms of the above ambiguities, Poliakoff's work catches not the spirit of the latter decade, but rather the changing mood alive in British society at the turn of the 1980s. In view of the substantial body of work behind him, it may therefore be time to redress the critical balance and to review Poliakoff's major theatrical concerns...