‘He patrols the corridors looking for undone top buttons, unauthorised coats and, particularly, hoodies,’ PAGE 26


THEATRE Missing in action


My City ALMEIDA THEATRE, LONDON


hen Stephen Poliakoff (born 1952) began his career in the 1970s, barely out of school, there was an easy and even inevitable link between writing for theatre and writing for TV. The production informa- tion in Plays: 1, the anthology of his early plays about disaffected urban youth, shows that Hitting Town was screened in ITV peak time within a year of being premiered at the Bush and that its successor City Sugarmade a similarly rapid journey into living rooms. This was a time when producers from ITV and BBC were routinely found in fringe the- atres, like scouts from league clubs at schoolboy football matches. The talent-spotters are still there but, these


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days, are more likely to sign up a promising young writer for a couple of episodes of a soap or a cop show rather than a transfer of their theatrical work. Then the recruits, if successful, will write original pieces for the medium and probably have to decide whether they most want to write for stage or screen. Poliakoff, for example, has been away from theatre since 1999, writing or directing TV or cinema proj- ects including Shooting the Past, Perfect


RADIO


Let generation speak unto generation


Something Understood: A Language That Speaks the Truth BBC RADIO FOUR


he American oral historian Studs Terkel died in 2008 at the advanced age of 96. A Language That Speaks the Truth (18 September), assembled just before his death, featured comments of unremitting pithiness from Terkel himself, extracts from works of literature that had some bearing on the matter to hand, and a variety of musical selections. If these didn’t always seem strikingly relevant to the problems of language and how you solved them, then it was good to hear Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” shar- ing air-space with Mozart and Steve Reich. There were three ages of man, Terkel briskly informed us at the outset: youth, middle-age


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Strangers, The Lost Prince and Glorious 39. This 12-year absence from live action ends


with My City, which both shows the influence of his long sabbatical behind a camera and, in the manner of a painter reworking youthful canvases later on, has the feel of a return in maturity to the themes and scenes of the Hitting Towns and City Sugars: schools, shop- ping malls, the secret life of a city. The opening image is a woman asleep on


a bench beside the Thames in the early evening, the impression of a tramp belied by her expensive coat and shoes. She turns out to be Miss Lambert, captivatingly well played by Tracey Ullman on her return to UK theatre after a lengthy spell working in American TV. Spiky, eccentric, disturbingly mysterious,


Lambert is a head teacher who, it turns out in a whopping coincidence that Poliakoff might not have allowed himself as a younger dramatist, once taught the passer-by who finds her kipping by the river: Richard (Tom Riley), a former special-needs student who benefitted from Lambert’s unusual pedagogic methods. These, as we see in flashbacks inter- leaving the contemporary scenes, involved telling magical-realist fables in morning assembly, assisted by two colleagues: Minken (David Troughton) and Summers (Sorcha Cusack), who add their own curious anecdotes and sometimes act them out with props from a suitcase. Somewhere under all this, there’s a debate about the way in which people dramatise their own existence and the thin line between cre-


and “You’re looking great”. Still, in addition, sounding great, Terkel proclaimed his interest in the slipperiness of language. Bertrand Russell was brought in to warn of a “dangerous tool” which canvassed the idea of “definiteness” and “completeness” but whose end result could be downright misleading. The point was rammed home by George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”. All polit- ical language, Orwell insisted, was designed to make lies sound truthful. “Democracy” was the preferred political system, so even the scabbiest tyrant could be found pretending that his regime was “democratic”. Terkel, too had his difficulties with fine- sounding abstract nouns. “Liberal”, he pointed out, meant “to be tolerant of the opinions of the others”, and if he didn’t exactly remark that this is not a quality associated with one or two modern liberals, then the suggestion hung tantalisingly in the air. He distrusted “Conservative”, too – didn’t everyone want to conserve things like blue skies and proper sanitation systems? Meanwhile, a literary accompaniment of T.S. Eliot (“Burnt Norton”) and Les Murray was being musically embel- lished by Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson.


ativity and deceit, which have been recurrent subjects in Poliakoff ’s work. Equally charac- teristic are the glimpses of an unseen London which is represented here by stories of an empty Underground train that runs in the middle of the night, the only passenger a marksman who shoots rats and pigeons. So the play contains a succession of arresting moments, both spoken and shown. The prob- lem is that Poliakoff, during his screen break, seems to have lost a sense of the difference between theatrical and cinematic tension. Poliakoff has said that his ambition, in pieces such as Shooting the Pastand Perfect Strangers, was to slow television down, rescuing the medium from the tyranny of fast-cutting and hectic direction. But theatre, if anything, suffers not a tyran-


nical quickness but a dictatorship of deliberation and yet Poliakoff has brought his slowed-down TV metronome into the the- atre. On stage, though, the action needs to be whipped along, with the actors sustaining energy and interest from minute to minute, which is almost impossible under direction as measured as this and with a structure that requires the actors to shift in the space of a short blackout to scenes in which they are much younger. My City delivers many pleasures, including Ullman’s comeback, but, though Poliakoff ’s early stage works showed others what he could bring to TV, he could do with studying those scripts himself to understand what he needs to bring back to theatre. Mark Lawson


Elsewhere, Terkel remembered the stirring times he had lived through: the great Depression, the Second World War, the 1960s – “I’m a survivor of that stuff.” He deplored the American tendency to refer to the young- sters of the 1940s as “the golden generation”, pointing out that the 1960s, with their advo- cacy of civil rights and feminism, and hostility to Vietnam, were “just as good”. The twenty- first century, on the other hand, had new linguistic protocols that he couldn’t begin to grasp: “You say website to me and I think of spiders and Robert the Bruce.” Inevitably, Terkel “couldn’t believe what had happened” to modern American language. Remembering the final words of the last Guardian article written by his old friend James Cameron, about hope subsiding but curiosity remaining, he maintained that his epitaph should be “Curiosity didn’t kill this cat.” One can only applaud the enlightened editor in Radio 4’s commissioning department who had the fore- sight to sponsor this classic half-hour, while hissing the dawn-patroller in scheduling who had the bright idea of putting it out at six o’clock on a Sunday morning. D.J. Taylor


24 September 2011 | THE TABLET | 25


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