Imagine
a Stephen Poliakoff retrospective. So much of his work both for stage
and screen, especially in more recent years, has been about memory and
the past that an entire season of looking back at looking back might
generate a temporal vortex that could make time travel a reality.
His first new stage play since 1999’s
Remember This
is squarely in the same territory, as a chance encounter reunites
thirtysomethings Richard and Julie with the primary school teacher who
had been so inspirational to them and a brace of her colleagues for a
single long, story-filled night. Some of the stories are a few weeks or
months old, some go back centuries; some are historical, most are
personal. But this is clearly a narrative about narratives: Poliakoff
is perhaps as fascinated by the power and status of stories as Philip
Ridley.
It was once remarked that human
beings are DNA’s way of replicating itself. The composite picture of
London that emerges from Miss Lambert’s accounts of her compulsive
nocturnal perambulations around the city and the “time-travel”
exercises she used to undertake in school assemblies (which are
themselves shown in flashback!) begins to suggest that its inhabitants
are the city’s way of remembering itself.
Miss
Lambert’s eccentric control of her environment, be it a park bench, a
basement flat or an all-night greasy-spoon café, is reflected by the
presence of Tracey Ullman in her first British stage appearance in an
age. By this I do not mean that she is the wacky comedienne of the
1980s… precisely the opposite: she is so very disciplined that she
compels our attention through the decorousness with which her character
recounts eerie or horrifying episodes. In past and present alike David
Troughton and Sorcha Cusack are, as it were, her wing-men. In contrast,
Tom Riley’s Richard and Siân Brooke’s Julie could scarcely be less
alike, united only by having been redeemed as children from attention
deficit disorder and dyslexia respectively by being taught that they
could take control for themselves.
The
play’s ending is too pat in its affirmation, and the impact of the
evening depends on one’s tastes for (and in) storytelling, but
Poliakoff’s own production can make one, on leaving the theatre, feel
one is seeing through London to a number of other cities shimmering in
its ether.
Written for the Financial
Times.