Quiet Riot: Stephen Poliakoff

Abstract

Stephen Poliakoff is a playwright who has become well known — particularly — for his television drama and screen work as opposed to his early work for the stage. Indeed, it is his mid-1970s dramatic work that I find most interesting in the context of the cynic sensibility. The three plays to be discussed in this chapter — in chronological order, Hitting Town, City Sugar and Strawberry Fields — all bear the hallmarks of the sensibility. They all, with degrees of variation, possess the key characteristics of a Bohemian/Romantic approach to their heroes, an apolitical bent opposed to party politics and all-encompassing ideological solutions to the problems of society, and an engagement with popular forms, being somewhat anti-modernist and in opposition to a rigid high/low culture dichotomy. Due to the comparatively low amount of scholarly writing on this part of Poliakoff’s career, I am to an extent ploughing new ground — hence I have used a closer reading style approach in analysing this work. The following quotation is taken from Poliakoff’s own introduction to his collected Plays: One:

Written in February 1975, soon after the Birmingham and Guildford bombings … I became very interested in trying to write a play about a personal reaction to the violence and the ugly mood of the mid-seventies, about people growing inward and private and lonely, after the noise and frivolity of the sixties.