Gordon Armstrong

SOURCE: "Cultural Politics and the Irish Theatre: Samuel Beckett and the New Biology," in Theatre Research International, Vol. 18, No. 3, Autumn, 1993, pp. 215-21.

[In the following essay, Armstrong discusses the influence of Erwin Schrodinger's theory of quantum biology on the dramas of Samuel Beckett.]

Sweat and mirror notwithstanding they might well pass for inanimate but for the left eyes which at incalculable intervals suddenly open wide and gaze in unblinking exposure long beyond what is humanly possible.

Samuel Beckett, Imagination Dead Imagine,

(12-13)

Lawrence Stone, Princeton Professor Emeritus of History, has recently declared that 'every cultural enterprise, even science, is at least in part a social construction.'¹ Biologist Jay Gould vehemently agrees. 'Science', says Gould, 'is done by individuals, whose conclusions are influenced by the beliefs they bring with them.'² The contamination factor is unavoidable. On the other hand, Erwin Schrodinger, the renowned quantum physicist, brought to biology experimental truths that may take us to the edge of the universe. For him, the contamination factor was intentional. Beginning in the 1940s, his work had a direct effect on the writings of Samuel Beckett.

Criticized by Irish friends like Jack Yeats for being amoral in his writings, Samuel Beckett, in his refusal to cater to the modernist, absurdist, existential tides of his generation was, on the contrary, profoundly engaged in cultural politics. His affinity for pictorial artwork, and his friendship with painters and sculptors—Jack Yeats, Bram and Geer Van Velde, Avigdor Arikha, and Henry Hayden in particular—was matched by his enthusiasm for quantum science. Beckett obtained a copy of Schrodinger's quantum biology lectures, and gave it to his uncle, Dr Gerald Beckett, in June 1946.3 Examining the deep structures of Beckett's works through Schrodinger's quantum biology lens clarifies a number of puzzling details. Imagination Dead Imagine, How It Is, Endgame, and Play are only a few of Beckett's works that are anchored in the bio-artistic framework that begins with Waiting for Godot.

Delivered in February 1943, under the auspices of the Institute at Trinity College, Dublin, Erwin Schrodinger's quantum biology lectures extended his elegant 1926 theory of quantum physics—describing the unfolding of quantum events not as the certainties of Newtonian mechanics, but as an undulating wave of possibilities—into the field of molecular biology. An edition of these lectures, entitled What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1944. In 1992, Professor L. C. Lewontin of Harvard described this particular text as 'the ideological manifesto of the new biology.'⁴ At the time, Samuel Beckett was in hiding from the Gestapo somewhere in the South of France (possibly at Roussillon in the Vaucluse). Where Beckett obtained the text is unknown, but he regarded it highly. As it turned out, Schrodinger's small text began a revolution in more than molecular biology. In a conversation with me in 1985, Beckett acknowledged with a wry grin the importance of Schrodinger's small oracle to his own work.⁵

The question might then be asked: 'How does the new biology relate to theatre, specifically, to Beckett's theatre?' One response is that theatre is constituent to the species. Theatre is because we evolved as we did. In our unique genetic development as homo sapiens sapiens, neurobiological capacities developed that can objectively be described as 'theatrical.' The union of a sound image and a concept in the left temporal lobe made possible the development of language capacity and abstract verbal formulations. In the beginning there were no words. Language arose as a compressed formulation of abstract concepts. Writing arose as a means of exchanging goods and fostering trade. But the capacities themselves arose and persisted for the broad benefit of the species because, as Antonio and Hanna Damasio described it, 'humans and species before them had become adept at generalizing and categorizing actions and at creating and categorizing mental representations of objects, events and relations.'⁶ As can no other species, we can plan the future; we can judge the past; we can contemplate the present.

Far from being pre-ordained even in a biological sense, we are a product of random evolutionary circumstances that Jay Gould has called, in an evolutionary context, 'punctuated equilibrium.' Five heads, for example, each with a different function, and three limbs, to propel us forward in circular motions (perhaps another version of Beckett's 'headlong tardigrade'), could have been options. As Gould explains: 'The contingency of evolution does not depend on the random nature of genetic mutation. It arises because mutations have qualitatively different effects, and because these effects can be amplified. .. . '⁷ Only the remarkable intelligence of a tiny creature on a primeval forest floor sixty-five million years ago marked the potential for our species' survival. When we do theatre we are replaying a biological heritage that extends well back into pre-history. The homo sapiens story began 570 million years before the present with the appearance of shelled, carapace animals in the Cambrian Age. The punctuated mutations evolved into modern man's precursors, some two and a half million years ago. Looking again at the immediate and long past history of the earth, John Wheeler, quantum physicist at Princeton University suggests, 'The deepest lesson of quantum mechanics may be that reality is defined by the questions we put to it.'⁸ This comes as no surprise to playwrights and performers who, similarly, have long framed the dramatic experience. There is no question that theatre, expressing the needs and conditions of human life, is any less indebted than our species to the track of photons as they approached a 'galactic beam splitter' some fifteen and a half billion years ago, waiting to be subjected to experimental forays conducted by unborn beings on a still nonexistent planet.

The emergence of homo sapiens sapiens across the evolutionary track of species is unique and fundamentally unpredictable. Surviving the disappearance of the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago, and the recent ice ages from one hundred thousand years ago down to ten or twelve thousand years ago, we are a prime example of successive quantum adaptations. The fact is that when one examines evolution, it is immediately apparent that the figure of an actor appearing onstage in a performance arena is only one tiny fragment of an epic story whose likelihood is manifestly unreasonable.

The opening citation from Imagination Dead Imagine indicates the same deep 'Schrodingerian' structure in Beckett's own creative works, and his profound interest in amplifying segments of What Is Life? in an artistic venue. In looking at the mechanisms of genetic development, 'on the average, only the 50th or 60th descendent of the egg that I was,' Schrodinger remarked on the marvels of 'the visible and manifest nature of the individual, which is reproduced without appreciable change for generations, permanent within centuries—though not within tens of thousands of years—' and carried forward by the species and within the species at a temperature that has not varied from the beginning. Beckett's text begins: 'No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine' (7). Something is taking place beneath the level of intellectual conception, something in a place as deep as the strata of Schrodinger's analysis of the DNA molecule. Beckett's processes of temperature and of light are Schrodingerian, 'combining in countless rhythms, commonly attend the passage from white and heat to black and cold, and vice versa . . . until, in the space of some twenty seconds, pitch black is reached and at the same time say freezing-point. Same remark for the reverse movement, towards heat and whiteness.' ⁹ Even Beckett's pendulum swing of temperatures is Schrodingerian: a return to stasis, 'rediscovered miraculously after what absence in perfect voids' against the background of 'the little fabric' (emphasis added).¹⁰

In What Is Life?, with a nod to quantum mechanics, Schrodinger suggested not linear continuity in the species, but genetic molecular discontinuity. At a given moment across a span of many centuries, everything changed. For Schrodinger, 'The great revelation of quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature' that defied the continuity anticipated by classical physics. 'The transition from one of these configurations to another is a quantum jump. If the second one [had] the greater energy (a higher level), the system [had to be] supplied from outside with at least the difference of the two energies to make the difference possible.' Beckett obliged with his bio-artistic imagery: 'Piercing pale blue the effect is striking, in the beginning. Never the two gazes together except once, when the beginning of one overlapped the end of the other' (13).

Beckett's contribution to the revolution was to envision this overlapping span in a concrete, bio-artistic frame 'from the fraction of the second to what would have seemed, in other times, other places, an eternity' (9). How did Beckett acknowledge this leap? Returning to the figures, each lying within his and her semicircle, he described the circumstances of a multi-generational quantum leap: 'Sweat and mirror notwithstanding they might well pass for inanimate but for the left eyes which at incalculable intervals suddenly open wide and gaze in unblinking exposure long beyond what is humanly possible' (12-13).

When analyzing difficult works, one must always be concerned not to construct forced and tortured interpretation, especially for works of a playwright who deliberately 'vaguens' his texts. But there is some evidence to suggest that, at one level, Beckett intended the source of energy to be from the outside. That energy was, as might have been predicted, the eye of the observer: the 'unique inquisitor' in Play, 'E' in Film, Bom or Pirn in How It Is, and a range of observers from Vladimir in Act Two of Waiting for Godot: 'At me too someone is looking' . . . , to Imagination Dead Imagine: ' . . . and at the same instant for the eye of prey the infinitesimal shudder instantaneously suppressed' (14). But on the level of 'new biology', Beckett explored this possible effect in the gene pool of the species: 'to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging . . . ?' (14)

As Beckett so expressly indicated, one need only use one's imagination—not the dead imagination of classical physics but the living imagination of the Book of Nature that Erwin Schrodinger deciphered, and Beckett so eloquently described. By adding an adjective and a noun phrase to the opening lines of Imagination Dead Imagine, the meaning becomes clear: with '[Classical] Imagination Dead, Imagine [the Book of Life and quantum genetics].'

The last phrase of Imagination Dead Imagine, 'and if not what they are doing,' returns the inquiry to Schrodinger's text, and the wait for the next eon of time and the contingencies of evolution. In another ten thousand years, qualitatively different mutations may develop, born of quantum leaps in the diploid molecules of Samuel Beckett's imaginative formulations—a discontinuous change, perhaps once in ten millenia.¹¹

A second thesis, and possibly of more interest than Schrodinger's brilliant adaptation of quantum physics to what has now become the new molecular biology, to Beckett and to us, is his description of positive and negative entropy—the basic behavioural principles of the living organism.¹² Described by Schrodinger as the characteristic feature of life, the state of maximum entropy is a dynamic equilibrium: 'Every process, event, happening—call it what you will: in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy—or, as you may say, produces positive entropy—and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death.'¹³ To avoid death, according to Schrodinger, a creature feeds upon negative entropy, drawing sustenance from the environment. In so doing, every living organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.

Beckett put this principle to work in a typically striking visual way. The most dramatic exemplars of the unavoidable positive entropy of life, old folk in various states of decay, litter the landscape of Beckettian dramaticules. Two examples illustrate a partial range of Beckett's thinking on this topic: Winnie's mound in Happy Days is an expression of the build-up of positive entropy (in Act One, up to her waist; in Act Two, up to her neck) as is Clov's first speech in Endgame, 'Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.'¹⁴ (The reference to Zeno's pile is only the more obvious basis of Beckett's thought processes.) The apparent contradiction of death growing stronger in the midst of life is the very foundation of Beckett's theatre.

The third thesis, directly related to Schrodinger's importance to Beckett's emergence as a playwright, came almost as a footnote to What Is Life? In a postscripted chapter—an Addendum on Free Will—Schrodinger described the self as 'not I but' 'the canvas' of life that we interpret as self.¹⁵ That notion opened a world of possibilities for Beckett that culminated in the 1972 première of Not I at New York City's Lincoln Center. Our notions of self—of 'I'—are not a substance at all, according to Schrodinger, but an interpretation of experience that is promoted to the level of 'I' at any given moment. So where is the permanent trace of life? In our minds only, or in a succession of minds that we determine as substance: 'Not I—me'! is Mouth's third person summary of this situation in Not I. The new biology, and possibly the developing dramatic theory of chaos, insist on the analysis of this basic hermeneutic as a keystone of man's relations to his environment. This is particularly true in Beckett's theatre, in which stages of an image evolve before the spectator's eyes, a methodology that Beckett developed from the writings and paintings of Jack Yeats.

The coupling factors of DNA biology played a central role in the emergence of Beckett's own bio-artistic works. Described by Lewontin as the 'grail of molecular biology,' he updated the missing pieces of a forty-nine-year-old debate begun at Trinity College, by noting that DNA is a dead molecule: 'It is also not self-reproducing, and it makes nothing. And finally, organisms are not determined by it.'¹⁶ What it does do is serve as a template. Lewontin explains:

Reproduction of DNA is, ironically, an uncoupling of the material strands, followed by a building up of new complementary strands on each of the parental strings. . . . The role of DNA is that it bears information that is read by the cell machinery in the production process. Subtly, DNA as information bearer is transmogrified successively into DNA as blueprint, as plan, as master plan, as master molecule.¹⁷

In How It Is, Beckett stunningly anticipated this entire sequence. Positing the replicating double helix of the DNA molecule in many specifics, the invariable sequence of How It Is works as follows: in a simplified four-part series, narrator flees Bom, finds Pirn, unites with Pirn, is abandoned by Pirn, unites with Bom, and beginning again, flees Bom. Lewontin described the biological grail process: 'By turning genes on and off in different parts of the developing organism at different times, the DNA creates "the living being" body and Mind.'18 In Beckett's biodramatic grail, Pirn and Bom know each other only by reputation: Pirn as the victim, and Bom as the tormentor of the narrator. They never meet, but serve in their sequential uncouplings as 'blueprint'-victim, as 'master molecule'-tormentor to the narrator. United in the interests of torment, separated in the event of suffering, in Beckett's unrelenting biodramas these DNA-couples present the spectacle of life's most basic confrontations. In every case, the tormentor bears information of the persona of a prior tormentor, which he inflicts upon a new victim, to 'transmogrify' as a tormentor at the next stage. Speaking in the third person, in a text without punctuation, 'before Pirn', the narrator carries a prior identity into Part Two, awaiting instructions for 'life the other above in the light said to have been mine .. . no one asking that of me never there a few images on and off (8).

A series of images begins with, presumably, a young Samuel Beckett saying his prayers at his mother's knee: 'I steal a look at her lips / she stops her eyes burn down on me again I cast up mine in haste and repeat awry' (15-16); then that of a girl and a dog on a grassy mound, the 'girl too whom I hold who holds me by the hand the arse I have . . . again about turn introrse fleeting face to face transfer of things swinging of arms silent relishing of sea and isles' (30); the last of a youth 'pale staring hair red pudding face with pimples protruding belly gaping fly spindle legs sagging knocking at the knees wide astraddle for greater stability feet splayed one hundred and thirty degrees fatuous half-smile' (30). These images from scenes in the light above mix with an immediate reality of a tongue lolling in the mud, of the sack 'where saving your reverence I have all the suffering of all the ages' (38), and filled with sustenance—Pim's tins of 'miraculous sardines.' The narrator's means of locomotion by crawling in the mud, 'right leg left right arm push pull' (47), continues until at last, with the left hand 'clawing for the take instead of the familiar slime an arse two cries one mute' (48). Pirn has been overtaken. The former tormentor becomes victim, the narrator as former victim, the new tormentor.

In part two of How It Is, the narrator replaces Pirn's memories with his own datum of life, 'namely the canvas upon which [experiences] are collected.' Part Three, Pirn's departure, corresponds to Schrodinger's 'youth that was I, [whom] you may come to speak of . . . in the third person.' The sequence of how it was before, with, and after Pirn's arrival and departure is Beckett's artistic development of Schrodinger's metaphor for the evolving self: 'you may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, . . . you still recollect the old one that used to be "I" but is now no loss at all.'¹⁹

Part Three of How It Is is life after Pirn before Bom, with the voice of us all 'without quaqua . . . alone in the dark the mud end at last of part two' (99). A moment of reflection occurs before the sequence renews itself: Bern reaches for the narrator, to begin Part Three, as the narrator reached for Pirn in Part One: 'Bern had come to cleave to me see later Pirn and me I had come to cleave to Pirn the same thing except that me Pirn Bern me Bern left me south' (109). With Bom's arrival the narrator acquires Bern's name, and a borrowed life 'said to have been mine above in the light' (109), moving in procession like some medieval tableau vivant; a vast train of beings where 'at the same instant I leave Bern another leaves Pirn and let us be at that instant one hundred thousand strong then fifty thousand departures fifty thousand abandoned no sun no earth nothing turning the same instant always everywhere' (112).

Outside time and space without extension, Beckett's characters have become quantum molecules in one dimension, failed habits of life in a more immediate sense, but inevitably depicted in real terms, in real life that transcends epistemological abstractions or Newtonian mathematical equations. Reproducing without appreciable change for generations—centuries if not for ten thousand years, 'and borne,' as Schrodinger noted, 'at each transmission by the material structure of the nuclei of the two cells which unite to form the fertilized egg cell,' the biology of homo sapiens is exposed at its quantum basis.²⁰ The marvel of that premise is the basis of What Is Life?, and of Beckett's How It Is. The template has been passed to the next generation.

A last commentary on Schrodinger's 'little canvas' of 'experience and memory': In Endgame, Hamm's bloodied handkerchief frames the action from the opening dialogue:

(Pause. Hamm stirs. He yawns under the handkerchief. He removes the handkerchief from his face. Very red face. Black glasses). HAMM. ME—(he yawns)—to play . . . (2)

to the last scene:

. . . speak no more.
(He holds handkerchief spread out before him).
Old stancher!
(Pause.)
You .. . remain.
(Pause. He covers his face with handkerchief
Lowers his arms to arm rests, remains
motionless).
(Brief tableau).

Curtain (84)

In this strange play about 'zeros' in perspective, of creatures dying of darkness, the use of a bloodied handkerchief to conceal Hamm's face is, on the surface, equally enigmatic. There are no running sores, no cankers or ulcers, as in earlier pieces; no external bleeding, no hint of a physical calamity to 'staunch.' Metaphysics is not ignored. Hamm tells the story of an engraver who, having seen the rising corn fields and the sails of a herring fleet, saw only ashes. He was 'spared,' according to Hamm, the presumptive world of hope through transcendent beauty. Momentary salvation comes only in the recognition of 'the game'—an endgame to be sure—where one can freely recognize the necessity of weeping and weeping, 'for nothing, so as not to laugh, and little by little . . . you begin to grieve' (68). Occasionally Hamm falters, as in the moment when he asks Clov for certain words from the heart: 'Stop, raise your head and look at all that beauty . . . that order. . . . Come now, you're not a brute beast, think upon these things and you'll see how all becomes clear. . . ." (80). To which Clov replies, significantly addressing not Hamm but the spectators: 'what skilled attention they get, all these dying of their wounds' (81).

Those wounds of memory cover Hamm's face, bloodying him all over, as surely as they bloodied Pirn in How It Is. To go on with life, Hamm staunches the wounds with his handkerchief, a manifestation of Beckett's deepest cry, of an earth 'extinguished though humankind never saw it lit'(81), and of Beckett's consolatory benediction to the dead from the living:

One day you'll say to yourself, I'm tired, I'll sit down, and you'll go and sit down. Then you'll say, I'm hungry, I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up. You'll say, I shouldn't have sat down, but since I have I'll sit on a little longer, then I'll get up and get something to eat, but you won't get up and you won't get anything to eat.

(Pause).

You'll look at the wall a while, then you'll say, I'll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I'll feel better, and you'll close them. And when you open them again there'll be no wall any more (36).

All of these speeches combine in the central image of identity, of self, of relations to others, of memory and of experiences of 'I' as a knowable bio-coupling. The maddening datum of recognition is precisely Schrodinger's neutral 'canvas,' upon which the data is collected. After long years of self-determination, Hamm's pathetic discovery that, 'what you really mean by "I " is merely that ground-stuff upon which [experience and memory] are collected.'²¹ Hamm's agony of recognition that past lives are no longer germane, even while 'hamming it up onstage,' or on the stage that Beckett takes as exemplary of life itself, is the last phase of life's processes. The bloody handkerchief signifies the pain of giving over to other selves and facing the humiliation of amounting only to 'that groundstuff,' a canvas of possibilities that is successionally discounted. There are no options. Hamm's multiple images create fractal zones of non-linear series of successive 'I's', of DNA molecules outside of our immediate time-space continuum: 'Infinite emptiness will be all around you, and all the resurrected dead of all ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe' (36).

In Endgame, the quantum biology of self, indicated by the fractal boundaries of communication—in particular, of what has been described as 'discontinuous neural mappings of the brain of homo sapiens'—is displayed with consummate artistic skill.²² The disparate stories add up to a lifetime of successive 'I's. With the addition of the handkerchief, 'bloodied all over,' as an expression of Hamm's internal predicament in staving off the final build-up of positive entropy, the thrust of this memory play is clear. In a universe of chaos, composed primarily of discontinuous endgames, play is all we have. What better form of play do we have than theatre play? In Schrodinger's What Is Life?, the declaration of the canvas of the self, the exploration of positive and negative entropy was the characteristic feature of life. The first manifesto of quantum biology changed the entire course of Beckett's literary career.

It has taken us five hundred years to begin to understand the geography of earth, and now with the COBE satellite and new space explorations, the geography and primordial structure of the universe: it may take us another five hundred years to begin to understand the geography of civilization, the components of Samuel Beckett's theatre and of Schrodinger's quantum biology, more recently described as 'the selfish gene.'²³

NOTES

¹ Lawrence Stone, 'The Revolution Over the Revolution,' New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIX, No. 11, June 11, 1992, p. 47.

² John Maynard Smith, 'Taking a Chance on Evolution,' New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIX, No. 9, May 14, 1992, p. 34.

³ James Knowlson, catalogue: Samuel Beckett: An Exhibition, exhibition: Reading University Library, May-July 1971. London: Turret Books, 1971, p. 52.

⁴ R. C. Lewontin, 'The Dream of the Human Genome,' The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIX, No. 10 (May 28, 1992), p. 31.

⁵ Erwin Schrodinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944, repr. 1955).

⁶ Antonio R. Damasio and Hanna Damasio, 'Brain and Language,' Mind and Brain, Scientific American, September, 1992, p. 89.

⁷ John Maynard Smith, 'Taking a Chance on Evolution,' New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIX, No. 9, May 14, 1992, p. 34.

⁸ John A. Wheeler, cited by John Horgan, 'Quantum Philosophy,' Scientific American, July 1992, p. 101.

⁹ Samuel Beckett, Imagination Dead Imagine, London: Calder and Boyars, 1965, p. 10.

¹⁰ Beckett, Imagination, p. 11.

¹¹ Schrodinger, Life, p. 51.

¹² Schrodinger, Life, pp. 69-70.

¹³ Schrodinger, Life, p. 72.

¹⁴ Samuel Beckett, Endgame, New York: Grove Press, 1958, p. 1.

¹⁵ Schrodinger, Life, p. 91.

¹⁶ Lewontin, 'Genome,' p. 33.

¹⁷ Lewontin, 'Genome,' p. 32-33.

¹⁸ Lewontin, 'Genome,' p. 32.

¹⁹ Schrodinger, Life, pp. 91-2.

²⁰ Schrodinger, Life, p. 31.

²¹ Schrodinger, Life, p. 92.

²² Gordon Armstrong, 'Unintentional Fallacies,' Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Fall 1992, Vol. VII, No. 2, pp. 7-27.

²³ See the popular science development of this idea in Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 1976, 1989.

Matthew Martin

SOURCE: "Stephen Poliakoff s Drama for the Post-Scientific Age," in Theatre Journal, Vol. 45, No. 2, May, 1993, pp. 197-211.

[In the following essay, Martin investigates Stephen Poliakoff's early plays as they dramatize life in the contemporary age of science and technology.]

The year 1989 saw the appearance both of a new play by Stephen Poliakoff, Playing with Trains, and of the first volume of his collected plays, Poliakoff Plays: One.¹ An unfortunate side-effect of issuing separate volumes of his collected work is the reinforcement this practice will give to the commonplace notion that Poliakoff s early plays, before Breaking the Silence (1984), are stylistically and theoretically distinct from the later plays. In trying to escape the shadow of his "most promising," strikingly unique Urban Canyon plays of the 1970s, Poliakoff clearly did set out to do some things differently in Breaking the Silence.² Its introduction of East European elements into his stage world, its sense of history as well as its historical setting, and its markedly mature handling of details, dialogue and stagecraft all combine for an effect calculated to be distinct from the quirky, volatile plays that preceded it. But upon closer inspection, we discover that Poliakoff s themes have changed little, and that perhaps the quirky, volatile Urban Canyon plays expressed them better, certainly with greater passion and energy. Like Brecht, Poliakoff has been interested in the functioning of individual characters as they interact with their physical and cultural environment. His is not primarily a social drama. Social relations in his work are consistently predicated by the physical, technological, and cultural realities that surround them. What Poliakoff produces after examining this interaction, unlike Brecht, is not epic theatre intended to motivate people of the Scientific Age to change their world. Rather, his plays inform us that the spirit of the scientific age has passed, and that we live among that age's decayed ruins, in the Urban Canyon.

Brecht's hope of motivating theatre audiences to change the structure of human relations was based on the natural inclination his early-to mid-twentieth century audiences had for scientifically altering their physical environment to make it more suitable for human existence.

It was as if mankind for the first time now began a conscious and coordinated effort to make the planet that was its home fit to live on. . . . In all directions man looked about himself with a new vision, to see how he could adapt to his convenience familiar but as yet unexploited objects. His surroundings changed increasingly from decade to decade, then from year to year, then almost from day to day.³

Science had empowered and encouraged people to understand the alterability of their natural, physical surroundings; armed with technology, it seemed no obstacle was too great for man's ingenuity. Brecht wanted to translate this scientific excitement into a similar perspective on our social environment, just as Marx had done in developing the scientific laws of social history.

Our own period, which is transforming nature in so many and different ways, takes pleasure in understanding things so that we can interfere. There is a great deal to man, we say; so a great deal can be made out of him. We must not start with him; we must start on him.⁴

But Brecht's assumption of his audience's scientific excitement and natural desire to investigate their surroundings has been rendered untenable by the generation with which Poliakoff grew up and about which he writes. Ironically, for the late twentieth century, it is the progress spawned of man's enthusiasm for changing his environment that has come full circle now to stamp that enthusiasm out. The physical environment of Poliakoff s world has been so altered by a decadent science run rampant, changing things for no apparent purpose or improvement, that it has become again bewilderingly oppressive, as monolithic and immutable as nature once seemed to be. Brecht may have sensed the qualitative shift taking place in our technological progress as his generation was passing ("It was together with my son that I first saw the moving pictures of the explosion at Hiroshima"),⁵ but it would take Poliakoff s perspective throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to document for the stage the social and cultural effects of technological progress in detail, and to analyse its historical roots.

Poliakoff s first major success, in the form of his West End debut, came after he shifted to the Urban Canyon style of drama, with the companion pieces Hitting Town and City Sugar (1975); The Carnation Gang (1974), Strawberry Fields (1977), Summer Party (1980) and the last stage play before Breaking the Silence, Favourite Nights (1981) can also be classified in this group. These works share one common, basic principle that helps to determine their thematic and dramaturgical style. Characters tend to define themselves not so much in terms of their own independent beliefs and attitudes, nor in terms of other characters, but in terms of their environment. The environment has become canyon-like—monolithic, encircling, immutable, inescapable—yet man-made, filled with TVs, radios, bizarre lighting, muzak, and more muzak. The people behind this artificial environment, however, are themselves rarely visible. (Leonard Brazil, as the man behind the pap-producing radio of Hitting Town and City Sugar, is a notable exception.) As Poliakoff manipulates this urban stage environment he brings various pressures to bear on his characters. Their reactions to these environmental forces reveal not so much how we should judge the individuals, but how we should understand the dynamics of their lives in connection with contemporary urban life.

What may strike the audience (and did strike the critics) as occasionally meandering dialogue or action, thematic indirection, or inconsistent character development in these plays, can usually be attributed to a difference of focus between audience and playwright. In fact, such critical dissatisfaction can be traced back to his early plays, Clever Soldiers (1974) and Heroes (1975). Irving Wardle could see no connection, for instance, between Heroes's striking characters and the play's political themes.

The life the two characters acquire runs in unrelated parallel to the ideological course the author has marked out for them.⁶

Similarly, Randall Craig praised Clever Soldiers's "Richly evocative atmospheres and exciting tensions," but found it thematically inadequate.⁷ With the Urban Canyon plays, Poliakoff learned to outflank his critics while continuing to avoid ideological didacticism. Atmospheres and tensions become central to his aesthetic, as, through them, he analyses and dissects the interrelationships between characters and environment.

Poliakoff aptly uses the metaphor of atomic structure to describe his characters' interactions in this post-scientific age, or atomic age drama.

My characters don't stand for anything, they are atoms bumping against each other. Through their lives I hope I throw shafts of light on to something larger.⁸

It is not as if an understanding of these atoms bumping together will reveal for Poliakoff a Boyle's Law of dramatic action. Nonetheless, the principle of experimentation is not dissimilar. Recurring variables are introduced into these environments: electronic and mass media (including practically all forms of electronic communication from radios and telephones to video cameras, VCRs and public address systems), music (in a variety of forms, including muzak, characters' singing, and a huge outdoor rock concert), and occasional, rare, outbreaks of silence. These are the environmental terms in which all of Poliakoff s canyon-dwellers define themselves, from the most mercurially anarchic, to the most emotionally apathetic.

Though his handling of the urban environment in Hitting Town was unusual, a clear sign of a unique voice coming into the British theatre, much of the critical attention was directed at the disturbing incestuous relationship between the architecture student, Ralph, and his sister, Clare, which serves as the subject of the play. The two, style and subject, are of course intimately related, for the nature of human relationships is dependent on the character of the physical environment. And in a society in which the environment has become hopelessly and decadently oppressive, human relationships will happen haphazardly. Poliakoff recently made the social/environmental connection explicit by noting, in retrospect, that

The incestuous relationship [in Hitting Town] seemed as fragile and impermanent as the architecture Clare and Ralph were passing through.⁹

The prototypical symbol of the Urban Canyon's pervasive, man-made oppression is muzak. Throughout many of Poliakoff s plays, and especially in Hitting Town, it serves as a reminder that this is an unnatural and inescapable landscape, exemplifying the manner in which society's inventions have taken on a life of their own. Ralph and Clare, the brother and sister who are just beginning to flirt with one another in a dirty, serviceless Wimpy bar, comment on this sign of their environment's impersonal and oppressive nature. Muzak is playing as they await any sign of a waiter or waitress.

Ralph: There's no escape. . . . There's one woman, you know, one single, anonymous, lady, who arranges all this muzak, produces it by herself, she does, this is true! It just pours out of her, uncontrollably, tons and tons of it! A real madwoman. We ought to find her, quickly, she's contaminating the whole place.¹⁰

Obviously, there is no finding this imaginary, crazed arranger and producer. But in Poliakoff s world, there's no finding the real perpetrators either. Although Ralph has come to visit his sister in Leicester, his comments about the recent terrorist bombings in his university town of Birmingham suggest that anonymous powers of all sorts seem to be controlling all of Britain's urban environments.

Nicola, the blank-faced teeny-bopper of Hitting Town and City Sugar and Ralph reflect two generations' reactions to such environmental nightmares. Nicola is the prototype of her generation and those to come. She is one of millions of "kids lapping up pap" on the radio and TV, and Poliakoff wishes to explore "the sterility of their lives."¹¹ Ralph is slightly older and a college student, just old enough to recall the 1960s, and that decade's apparent near-miss in actually returning the power of the popular media to the hands of the populace. This is very much the historical position Poliakoff found himself in when he began his own short-lived academic career at Cambridge.

I was there just as the smoke of student rebellion was clearing—I found it very claustrophobic, a finishing school for the upper middle classes.¹²

Ralph has not entirely submitted to his environment; he maintains a degree of mercurial, questioning energy which is a prerequisite for a Brechtian sort of scientific and social investigative fervor. But energy is all Ralph has, because he, like the 1960s generation before him, is controlled and oppressed by his environment sufficiently to limit any creative, productive or critical thinking that might translate into useful action at some point. Surrounded by noises, muzak, depressing buildings, all Ralph can do is make lame jokes and lash out violently. As a student of architecture, someone who clearly took an interest at some point in gaining control over his environment, he speaks to Nicola of his and his sister Clare's night of hitting the town.

Ralph: Look at it! Totally unsafe, it'd burn like balsa wood. (Aggressive) And full of TV shops, it's just a morgue for them.

. . . Whole centre has changed—me and my sister used to know a different place. You know most of the architects of this atrocity are probably in gaol or just about to be. But we're left with it! Something ought to be done.¹³

But this post-1960s generation is nearly defeated. Ralph will do nothing even though he is both a student of architecture and a (former) student activist. As their relationship continues to become more and more sexually tense, Clare suddenly confronts Ralph with his incapacity for useful action.

Clare: . . . (With a provocative smile, touching him) You've given up all your rebellious activities . . . at college, haven't you.

Why are students now all so grey and defeated, and miserable and can't do anything? All that energy and you just don't know what to do with it, all you can do is thrash about and shout.¹⁴

Without an active academic or social interest in the environmental problems this new age poses for his generation, Ralph's social relationships receive no analytical attention either. Poliakoff is here not simply demonstrating the thesis that the environment has gone to pot, so social relationships have become decadently perverted. The more striking aspect of Ralph and Clare's sexual attraction to one another, rather than its perversion, consists in Poliakoff s careful detailing of its psychological progression, particularly their own lack of selfquestioning as they fall into it. They worry about getting caught, for they know incest is illegal, but never wonder about what is drawing them toward each other or what effects such a relationship might have. But Ralph is progressively failing to question anything, as he releases his energies haphazardly, often in obviously dangerous and immoral ways, such as phoning the newspaper with a fake I.R.A. bomb threat—a last-ditch effort to transform himself into one of the anonymous manipulators of his urban world. The investigative spirit of the scientific age, of which Ralph is a decaying remnant, is quite nearly dead.

Poliakoff highlights this controlling dynamic between the couple and their environment by including a brief dialogue focused on the possibility of feeling something, in this case guilt, during the first extended moment of environmental silence in the play. The couple are again in Clare's high-rise apartment.

Ralph: It's terrifyingly quiet, isn't it, Clare.
Clare: For once, yes.
Ralph: Are you feeling guilty then?
Clare: About what?

Ralph: Don't start that. You know what I mean. . . . About us doing it—are you? . . .

Clare: No, not really. Why should I.

This moment soon passes, as Ralph points out, "The noise is beginning to come up, hear it?"

Clare: Yes.

Ralph: . . . Can't have that happening, can we? Look at it Clare. . . . Great grey mess—starting up again, spilling out.¹⁵

Within minutes, Ralph is dialing in his bomb threat, and Clare is suggesting that she might see him again in the near future. As Leonard Brazil comes over the radio with "some loud Muzak, " Clare sums up the degree of its control over her physical and intellectual life in the play's last line: "When this music stops . . . I'm going to work."¹⁶

Nicola, who is examined in more detail in City Sugar, is quite a bit different from Ralph in ways that reflect the greater sterility of her generation. She has none of his rebellious tendencies, and is even more environmentally-dependent than Ralph or Clare. City Sugar is a wellbalanced companion piece to Hitting Town because in it we get a rare glimpse of one of the men behind this inhuman, Muzak-filled environment—pop disc jockey Leonard Brazil. The play itself is not fascinated so much with the sterility of Nicola's pap-filled life—that was sufficiently established in Hitting Town. Rather it focuses on Brazil's fascination with her life's sterility. And because the play pinpoints Brazil as the man responsible for much of her environment (he is equivalent to the anonymous lady of Ralph's nightmarish Muzak anecdote), it becomes a contemporary version of Shelley's Frankenstein story. Brazil has very much created an alienated, nearly inhuman creature, and he tracks her down in a desperate attempt to establish some sort of human contact with her.

Brazil becomes fascinated with Nicola upon first hearing her voice during a call-in contest in which fans compete for a chance to meet members of their favorite pop group, The Yellow Jacks. (The band is appropriately named; a ship flies the Yellow Jack when disease is present on board.) Described in the stage directions as "extremely flat, unemotional," her voice signals to him that she is the prototype of his followers—deadened and controlled as far as the human spirit will allow.¹⁷ And he immediately begins thinking of her in intimate, sexual ways.

Leonard: (suddenly interested) And what are you wearing, Nicola?

Nicola: Trousers . . . shoes.

Leonard: That's an interesting picture, she's wearing just trousers and shoes. Only wish we had television phones, sexy Nicola. . . .¹⁸

Seen in comparison with Brazil's description of a contemporary open-air concert, his fascination with making some sort of human contact with the generation he has created appears to have virtually necrophilic overtones.

Everybody was lying about in lifeless heaps. . . . I saw one girl. . . . Her face and also her lips were sort of swollen, and completely ashen, almost blue, in fact, as if she was actually physically dead. I almost wanted to go up and touch her. .. . In fact I haven't got that picture out of my mind yet.¹⁹

This last description is juxtaposed with Rex, his on-air sidekick, bringing in the "twenty-five dummies on a trolley, piled high," which Brazil has made his fans put together as part of the competition. Brazil's fascination with his own monster-making power has led him to demonstrate it by making his creations in turn create even moreobviously dead creatures. Nicola's dummy is a particularly poignant representation of her own condition, as she has filled it up, literally, with all the objects that have been filling up her environment—things she has "nicked" from the supermarket, and all the pop music "posters and ornaments—everything in her room."²⁰

In her work-place, where she and her friend Susan do no work at all, Nicola is subjected to the environmental pressure of the video camera. If, she says, we're "seen talking .. . by the camera . . . we'll both get it, won't we?" And just as Ralph fantasized earlier who the maniacal individual might be who could take responsibility for Muzak, so these two girls speculate about who is on the other side of the lens.

Nicola: Do you know what he looks like?

Susan: Yes, I saw him through the door once. He's very fat. I've heard all about him, he sits there all day, with one of his socks off, picking his toes, and eating the stuff, while he watches. . . .

Nicola: You're making all this up, like always.²¹

Although Nicola and Susan, and Ralph and Clare, are never depicted as utterly defeated, serious speculation into their environment or social relationships seems beyond them. Poliakoff directly contravenes Brecht's statement that in epic theatre "the 'historical conditions' must of course not be imagined .. . as mysterious powers (in the background); on the contrary, they are created and maintained by men (and will in due course be altered by them)."²² Poliakoff s "historical conditions" are deliberately mysterious and oppressive to his characters. And the only man the audience sees maintaining them, Leonard Brazil, is so hidden away up in the sky in his broadcast booth, it seems he has become a mysterious, controlling deity. It is due only to Brazil's own whim that Nicola gets a chance to run the obstacle course, the Yellow Jacks' competition, necessary to meet and speak with him. City Sugar ends with no indication that Brazil will change, only move to London and hence gain an even greater audience. His sidekick/clone, Rex, will be prepared to take over his position in Leicester. The records will continue to play and, as Brazil puts it, continue to "spin another circle of happiness and pour a little more sugar over the city."²³ He signs off saying, insincerely, "Be seeing you"—the only more unlikely occurrence being that any of us might actually see him, the man behind the music.

The most powerful and memorable of Poliakoff s Urban Canyon plays is Strawberry Fields (1977), the story of Kevin and Charlotte, two confused political activists, who travel Britain in pursuit of their vague ideals. The continuing success of the play has come as a bit of a surprise to the author himself, who expected it to age less well than it has.

The play clearly belongs to the mid-seventies in its depiction of the hippy dream turning sour. . . . But with all the incidents of European terrorism both from the left and the right since the play was written [it] has proved to have one of the busiest lives of any of my plays, being regularly performed all over the world.

Even the conservationist themes take on a particular resonance for us now, he notes,

raising the possibility of some people reacting with savagery against the urban world they have grown up in, as they try to project themselves into a never-never land where the car can be deinvented and motorways no longer exist.²⁴

The title appropriately alludes to the high priest of the hippy dream, one who never lost touch with that dream's fundamental confusion, or dark side, John Lennon, and that awareness as reflected in his song, "Strawberry Fields."

Always know, sometimes think it's me, But you know I know when it's a dream. I think a "No" will be a "Yes," but it's all wrong, That is I think I disagree.

Whether or not the 1960s really offered any substantial hope "that things were going to get better and better, that there would be inevitable progress towards more freedom, love not war, all that sort of thing" does not seem to be the question in the drama. The environment is as unalterable as ever, the final, decadent, logical extension of the scientific spirit; and the characters are logical extensions of what Poliakoff calls "wishy-washy liberal attitudes."²⁵ Both the bad and the good aspects of the 1960s—the phenomenal growth and pervasiveness of pop culture, and the rise of spirited individualism, respectively—had decayed in the 1970s into most of that individualism being destroyed in turn by that pop culture. The few individuals remaining, Poliakoff fears, are "individuals" by virtue of their remaining energy and spark, but intellectually and emotionally they have been equally as vulnerable to environmental derangement as others of their generation. Their individuality, thus twisted, now seems more of a threat, morally dangerous and potentially fascistic.

The central image of Strawberry Fields is that of the B-grade film, as the play itself enacts a sort of degenerated version of a road movie, in the Easy Rider tradition. Kevin, who is apparently going blind to the world around him, physically and metaphorically, has visions of every horrible, blood-and-gore film he has ever seen running through his head—and he describes them in remarkable detail, even pretending for a moment that he could project them out of his eyes onto a wall. He wallows, as well, in the vapid memories he has of the sixties, leaving him little mental energy with which to question his political approach to the 1970s.

Charlotte, who is considerably younger than Kevin, is deceptively normal-looking, while being rather like Nicola of City Sugar insofar as she has been emotionally flattened by her world. She does not have Kevin's memories of the 1960s, but rather an even more vague nostalgia for an edenic past:

(She gazes out across the landscape.) This sprawling mess, it's just degrading. It presses down on us all. (Loud) Do you know what used to be here . . . a valley and fields. . . . Somebody's got to do something.²⁶

Like Ralph's in Hitting Town, Charlotte's angst seems to be as far as she has thought the issue through, and she is unsure exactly what that "something" is that needs doing. Nonetheless, her remaining energy will lead her to kill for it. When an outsider, Nick, asks questions about the details of her views, suspecting her of National Front membership, she is unable to articulate them.

Charlotte: You know what they are. You read the leaflet.

Nick: I want to hear you say them. . . . Explain them to me Charlotte.

Charlotte: . . . No. You'd only mock, wouldn't you?²⁷

Whereas Kevin's and Charlotte's reasoning has been addled by their environment, the play's moments of greatest dramatic tension occur as soon as the constant background noise disappears. For Ralph and Clare in Hitting Town, such a moment of silence in the morning was a fleeting opportunity to gain a fresh perspective on their situation. For Charlotte, moments of silence serve as a call to reason and to human contact, both of which Nick himself represents, and neither of which she finds herself able to respond to. Hence these moments provoke her most intense crises, driving her ultimately to murder.

Two shootings occur in the play, both taking place in quiet, deserted areas at particularly quiet moments, and both being followed by deliberately loud, jarring noises that accentuate the silence preceding them. At the end of act 1, after Charlotte empties her gun into a police officer on a deserted street, who seemed about to uncover the purpose of their journey, the lights fade quickly and the stage directions call for "a loud electric buzz lasting 50 seconds in the blackout." That buzz is what opens act 2 and draws us back into the heart of the Urban Canyon—a neon-lit motorway cafe. We are reminded that the previous scene was far from this electronic environment, in a place where Charlotte said she felt "a little exposed .. . out here." Symbolically, this first shooting is set outside a decaying, condemned movie theatre, leaving Kevin, for once, outside this contemporary equivalent of Plato's allegorical cave, a place shut out from reality with only flickering representations on the wall. But in this exposed area of town, which news reports tell us "is awaiting demolition," Kevin only persists in trying to project his own distorted mental images against the outside of the theatre, while Charlotte follows her own lights by pulling the trigger.

The second shooting, the murder of Nick at the end of act 2, takes place on a hillside also far outside the city. The stage directions call for lights up full to indicate the arrival of dawn, as the sirens that have been pursuing our fugitive trio have passed them by and faded into the distance.

Nick: God, it's still, isn't it? Suddenly there's no wind at all . . . just quiet.

Charlotte: Yes. Don't turn round, now, Nick.

With that she shoots him, and again the silence is overtaken by the soundtrack, which immediately produces "traffic news . . . blasting out fiercely. Then total silence."²⁸

Charlotte is ill-equipped to deal with these moments of silence, moments of choice beyond the canyon walls. She vividly sums up the subjective experience and consciousness of individuals living in the various urban environments which Poliakoff has described for us in this phase of his career, when she recounts an experience she had swimming in a lake "thick with mud and oil and things." She expresses the overwhelming sense of helplessness Brecht wanted to eradicate in his theatre audiences.

I couldn't see anything except a sort of horrid, muzzy darkness. It went all over me and in me. Over my mouth like a mud gag. (Suddenly) It feels like that now doesn't it, all the time. . . . Doesn't it? Put your hand over your mouth. . . . That's what it felt like—feels like—all the time for a lot of people.²⁹

The most remarkable aspect of Poliakoff s very different "European" play, Breaking the Silence, is the degree to which it manages to explore the same themes of the Urban Canyon plays—albeit from a fresh, revealing perspective. Probing along the two new axes of history and geography, the playwright discovers in post-revolutionary Russia the rich sense of "possibility" that characterized the height of the scientific age, as well as the seeds of the scientific decadence which would eventually become the scourge of England. Verkoff is correct in noting the former when he says in this play, "What rich times these are, eh?" And so is Nikolai Semenovitch when he warns of the latter: "I can assure you my friend—the modern world is grinding around in this carriage, forcing its way out, coming into existence right here."³⁰

Nikolai Semenovitch Pesiakoff is an inventor living obliviously through the social upheavals of post-revolutionary Russia. Verkoff, a government bureaucrat, orders Nikolai to become a telephone examiner, forcing him and his family to live in a rail car on a deserted north-eastern line. Nikolai ignores all his new duties in favor of pursuing his experiments; he is attempting to join sound to motion pictures. His family finds the tension in the car unbearable as their fear of government retaliation for Nikolai's truancy mounts, and as his own dictatorial behaviour towards others, especially the maid, Polya, increases with his passion for his designs. Eugenia, his wife, begins covering for Nikolai, falsifying his work-journal in hopes of pleasing the regime. Sasha, his son, eventually destroys his father's camera lenses, crucial to completing the virtually-finished and successful experiments.

Verkoff, it turns out, had landed Nikolai this ludicrously isolated post knowing full well that the inventor was too bullheaded to fulfill its duties, and that he would then continue to experiment in peace. (Nikolai had repeatedly applied to Verkoff and the Leninist government for official support, to no avail—but he had unknowingly gained Verkoff s admiration and sympathy.) As the brief tolerance of the early Stalin period gives way, Verkoff does Nikolai a final favor by securing his family permission to emigrate. The play closes with them in another rail car, bound for England.

The same environmental pressures are at work on Nikolai's family in the railway carriage as those faced by Ralph, Clare and Nicola back in Hitting Town. The compressed atmosphere of the carriage, aggravated by the scientific dictatorship of the father, contains in embryo all the elemental dynamics of culture and science which will control Nicola, Nikolai Semenovitch's spiritual offspring, decades later in the contemporary England of City Sugar. Nikolai embodies the contradictions inherent in the decline of the scientific age. His obsession (for what will eventually become a form of mass-media entertainment) turns him away from the emotional realities of his family—it becomes development for development's sake. Nikolai speaks of the wonderful potential of his work for the field of communication; spin-off inventions might enable us to speak to the deaf, he tells us. And yet he is the man slowly going deaf to those around him, ignoring the stress he is placing on his family, and listening to none of them. All for sound movies, which should remind us of that film-victim, Kevin, for whom film had become a mass communicator with little of value to say.

Verkoff is the great, enabling character of the play, the creative force, with a sense for how personalities operate, that provides Nikolai with his opportunity to succeed. He is a controlling figure, a bureaucrat made visible again, like Leonard Brazil—except that he pulls the invisible strings of government to sponsor creative energy and individual initiative, rather than to stamp it out. It is the tragedy of the future Urban Canyon that the creative opportunity Verkoff provides is destroyed by Nikolai's own overwhelming creative drive, which runs rampant, squelching the initiatives of those he lives with, disturbing and warping them.

Nikolai's son Sasha is, like Nicola in Hitting Town, a hint of the spiritless, unimaginative generations to come. When travelling with his father on his first train trip to the Northern District, Sasha can only complain of his hunger, and must have Nikolai conjure up images of what wonderful food they might be eating, rather than the millet they have. Sasha is not one to have his eyes on the future or on imaginative developments. When required to do a report for school, he chooses as his topic the sewage system of Moscow, and memorizes a string of facts associated with it. He is keenly embarrassed by his father's eccentricities, keenly sensitive to the pressure of his peers, and wants only to conform. In miniature, Sasha's destruction of his father's lenses mirrors the same blind ignorance that leads someone like Kevin, who really is suffering from diseased retinas, to his destructive agenda in Strawberry Fields. In Sasha's case the violent act turned out momentarily for the best—abandoning the destroyed project allowed Nikolai to break his personal silence with his wife—but it was nonetheless an act of blind, ill-informed violence on the son's part.

The history of "the modern world" to which Nikolai refers is not presented in this play with the Brechtian intention of revealing the cracks—places where society might have done otherwise and so improved our present lot. Instead we are left at the end of this play with the sense that the constructive release of energies which takes place in the various interrelationships among the characters is a possibility linked inextricably with the time and place in which they occur. As the whole family moves from the desolation and silence of northern Russia, where Nikolai came close to breaking the silence of film, to the easternmost border of the country on their way to England, the noises of modern technology in the background increase. Consequently, so does Nikolai's and Eugenia's horrified understanding of what the future in the West holds for them. Even though Nikolai was the telephone examiner, we haven't heard a single phone ring throughout the play—now it is one of many constant background noises.

An ear-splitting screech, the sound of a locomotive backs up towards them, a piercing sound of movement and violent braking that touches the pit of the stomach.

Eugenia: I wish something would happen to stop us going. . . . You did it, though. I know you did. We know we existed.

The crunch of a locomotive up close, the sounds are violent, wrenching.

Sasha: I will write it up here, Papa, . . . on the wall, a record, there must be a record, the date . . . and what happened here.³¹

Even the memory of this time, Poliakoff suggests, is destined to be lost to Sasha and future generations, for Nikolai's son cannot manage to write the record on the wall.

Here on the edge of Russia is Nikolai's and Eugenia's last chance to break their own personal silence, and to recognize their more human achievements despite their scientific failure. Eugenia overcomes the "enormous weight in the air" of Nikolai's scientific obsession to act on her own desires, and Nikolai overcomes his scientific obsession to recognize Eugenia's worth as a human being, not just as an ornamental wife.

Nikolai: .. . the energy generated in here, felt at times, if you will allow the slight exaggeration, felt it could flatten city walls. A way was found of releasing our separate energies. . . .³²

The exaggeration is deliberate, and falls into line with much of Poliakoff s thinking in his other plays. The basic release of meaningful energies between individuals is always intertwined with the flattening of the city walls of the Urban Canyon. It is as if the drama in this railway carriage came painfully close to fulfilling Brecht's hopes for an empowering theatre.

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights, and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself."³³

But, as often in Poliakoff, this field remains untransformable by individuals; it is not changed, but merely left behind.

The field is undergoing the transformation from Leninism to Stalinism, but no individual we see has a powerful role to play in that process. As Nikolai says, "Large events, great events even, have happened just outside, and we've seen most of them—or heard most of them to be more accurate. Meanwhile in here, locked up in this, squashed into this matchbox."³⁴ The manner in which these characters' lives run simultaneously with the rise of Stalinism, never intersecting significantly with the political scene, is reminiscent of Irving Wardle's complaints about the early play, Heroes. Breaking the Silence makes clear the necessity of such a division to Poliakoff s aesthetic.

We know that none of the actions of these characters is going to change the course of history. Nonetheless, we can blame Nikolai for pursuing the idea of sound-on-film as a decadent pursuit of scientific "achievement" for its own sake, which demanded the insensitive distancing of human relationships. Just as most urban dwellers would never get a chance to make contact with the man behind the name "Leonard Brazil," or the people behind the video camera, so here Nikolai begins to disappear behind his own rudimentary technology. As Polya sings to him through the speaking tube at one point, she can't see out the window to determine whether or not he is really at the other end.

Polya: I am sure the Master is no longer there. (Calling down) Are you? He's walked off and left me singing to an empty railway line.³⁵

She might as well be calling out to a movie screen or a video camera, for their creators may just as well have walked away and we would never know the difference. But to blame Nikolai is to suggest in a Brechtian manner that he should have acted differently, and been more sensitive to those around him. Yet we know no matter what Nikolai does, The Jazz Singer is going to open in New York in 1927, and, further west, a million other sound movies are going to be produced for the likes of Kevin in Strawberry Fields. What happens among these Russian characters cannot do much to change that.

What little hope Poliakoff does see for counteracting the sterility of contemporary British society inevitably comes out of Europe, as it almost does here in Breaking the Silence, and as in the appearance of Halina in Coming in to Land. A Polish emigré seeking citizenship in England, she brings some earthy vitality into the stunted, selfsatisfied existence of Neville, a London lawyer specializing in, predictably, the deadening world of the entertainment industry. Halina obstinately refuses Neville's offer of a mock-marriage for the purpose of 'landing' her at emigration, and instead mounts her own one-woman media campaign, complete with a fabricated story of the abuse she had suffered at the hands of the Polish police. Although her strategy fails in gaining her asylum, she is not only successful in transmitting her energies in an immediate, personal way to Neville, but she actually manages to make a dent in the pop techno-culture of London using only the sheer force of her personality. Neville is shocked to find her popping up "all over the media, handling it with alarming efficiency." So alarmed, in fact, is Neville, that he re-examines his media-centric existence, and now finds himself "peering at a world of dying video shops. . . . "³⁶

It is unfortunately difficult to see in what way Poliakoff s most recent play, Playing with Trains, is much more than a rather predictable variation on the ideas (and images) introduced in Breaking The Silence. And the emphasis is on ideas in this play, as opposed to dramatic technique. Whereas Breaking The Silence continued to make effective stage use of the environmental pressures within the rail car, both visually and aurally (a key to the energy of his earlier plays), Playing With Trains is content more or less with putting ideas on trial before an audience. During Bill Galpin's libel suit, he is questioned about his philosophy as an industrial researcher and developer, and one observer on stage gives us our choices as to how we should consider responding to this character.

There're two ways of looking at him I suppose. . . . An inspired innovator taking risks, evangelical, ahead of his time—or somebody who's just turned into a slightly careless property tycoon.³⁷

There is something bloodless or enervated in this kind of schematizing of characters. Galpin becomes a Verkoff-like, impresario figure gone haywire, with none of Verkoff's texture as a person on stage, as well as none of the Russian character's understanding of the individual personalities which surround him. Galpin has an eye for spotting talent, but when it comes to promotion, he can promote nothing but his own ideas, if indeed they are his own. In addition to his insensitivity and failures on a personal level, some of his philosophical pronouncements begin to sound simply like Poliakoff' s own, rather than the stuff of drama.

We [are] over concentrating on high tech at the expense of low. . . . High tech products .. . are seducing us away from reality. . . . The ideal existence we are being offered to strive for is a house stuffed with home computers and video recorders and two ridiculously energy-wasteful cars in the drive.³⁸

Until now, Poliakoff has always been concerned with allowing us to feel this high tech disease in the pit of our stomachs, by stuffing his stage with its presence—muzak, videos, radio pop. Why now choose to outline it in more abstract terms? Poliakoff might instead take the time to begin questioning his own terms or move on to new territory.³⁹ The paradox of the scientific age's having provided the creative impulse which ultimately squelches similar initiative in ensuing generations gets played out again here. Galpin's vision, particularly that of the road-rail vehicle which he has high hopes for, and from which the play derives its title, like Nikolai's vision, nearly becomes his own undoing, as his projects flounder and his family leave him. People are always trying to speak to him over intercoms, unsuccessfully, just as Polya sang "to an empty railway line" through a speaking tube. Physical contact with the man is virtually non-existent, as he begins, in his daughter Roxanna's words, "inhabiting [his] vision." And yet this play never allows us to forget its allegorical nature, types never quite become characters, position speeches never quite entrance us as plot. Poliakoff himself has come to inhabit his own vision in a strangely detached way, refusing to allow his characters any of the anarchic energy which characterized his earlier creations. Both Roxanna, in Playing With Trains, and Clare, of Hitting Town, conclude their respective plays by declaring their intention to "get to work." But in Clare's case, we have been made to feel what incredible environmental odds she is up against in making good on her promise. (She declares she'll start as soon as "this music stops.") Roxanna and her father settle into a productive companionship at the end, which seems to have little to do with the environment itself that Galpin has been lecturing about all along.

Many of Poliakoff' s thematic concerns seem, in this latest play, to have become uninterestingly schematized, and critics who complained in the 1970s that his plays were thematically vague (but atmospherically provocative) should now be no better pleased with a piece that is thematically deliberate (and atmospherically dull). For many, Breaking The Silence marks the high point of the playwright's achievement—an ambitious and skillful balancing of history and contemporary social critique, compelling drama and idiosyncratic staging, theme and atmosphere. Yet it is important to keep the success of early plays like Hitting Town, City Sugar, and Strawberry Fields in mind. A better understanding of how Playing With Trains's themes underlie the volatile anti-Brechtian, post-scientific age workings of nearly all the early plays should lead critics to a better, more sympathetic appreciation of what they will be re-reading in Poliakoff Plays: One. The need to "flatten city walls" is ongoing, and the effort will not be helped by Poliakoff's disappearance behind the overt themes and more traditional staging of his recent, "well-made" plays.

NOTES

¹ Stephen Poliakoff, Poliakoff Plays: One (London: Methuen, 1989).

² Poliakoff won the Evening Standard's "Most Promising Playwright" award in 1976 for Hitting Town and City Sugar.

³ Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), 184.

⁴ Ibid., 193.

⁵ Ibid., 184.

⁶ Irving Wardle, "Heroes," The Times, 3 July 1975, 37.

⁷ Randall Craig, Rev. of Clever Soldiers, Drama 116 (1975): 69-71.

⁸ From an interview with Lyn Gardner, "Coming of Age," Drama: The Quarterly Theatre Review 163 (1987): 20.

⁹Poliakoff Plays: One, xi.

¹⁰ Stephen Poliakoff, Hitting Town and City Sugar (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), 14.

¹¹ Gardner, "Coming of Age," 20.

¹² Ibid., 19.

¹³ Poliakoff, Hitting Town and City Sugar, 22.

¹⁴ Ibid., 38.

¹⁵ Ibid., 44-46.

¹⁶ Ibid., 51.

¹⁷ Poliakoff is careful to point out that his "characters always refuse to be trampled on—even the girls in City Sugar are not totally destroyed or made into zombies"; in Oleg Kerensky, The New British Drama: Fourteen British Playwrights since Osborne and Pinter (New York: Taplinger, 1977), 262.

¹⁸ Poliakoff, Hitting Town and City Sugar, 65.

¹⁹ Ibid., 91.

²⁰ Ibid., 82, 84.

²¹ Ibid., 69.

²² Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 190.

²³ Poliakoff, Hitting Town and City Sugar, 121.

²⁴Poliakoff Plays: One, xiv.

²⁵ Kerensky, The New British Drama, 261, 262.

²⁶ Stephen Poliakoff, Strawberry Fields (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), 44.

²⁷ Ibid., 19.

²⁸ Ibid., 51-52.

²⁹ Ibid., 42.

³⁰ Stephen Poliakoff, Breaking The Silence (London: Methuen, 1987), 27.

³¹ Ibid., 51-52.

³² Ibid., 49-50.

³³ Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 190.

³⁴ Poliakoff, Breaking the Silence, 49.

³⁵ Ibid., 19.

³⁶ Stephen Poliakoff, Coming Into Land (London: Methuen, 1986), 100.

³⁷ Stephen Poliakoff, Playing With Trains (London: Methuen, 1989), 63.

³⁸ Ibid., 68-69.

³⁹ The uncomfortable parallels between Galpin's and Poliakoff s views were made more explicit in performance by the program's listing of British technical innovations that had gone overseas for development.