British playwright, director, scriptwriter (b. 1952)
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The second of four children, he was sent at a young age to Marlborough House School, which he hated. He then attended Westminster School, where he attracted sufficient attention for Granny, a play he wrote and directed, to be reviewed in The Times newspaper. After Westminster, he went to King's College, Cambridge to read history but left after two years, later recalling Cambridge as "a stuffy place" and the history course as "shockingly bad".[6]
Poliakoff's theatre, although well received critically, has never achieved a great level of attention from the critics, apart from their reviews. This has been attributed to the ambiguity of his politics.[14] His approach towards political issues has been described as individual in nature rather than generalising.[12] Some of the recurring themes in his works have been recognised as[14] environmental pollution, due to human intervention, both rural and urban. Most of his plays portray contemporary Britain. He is scared of and fascinated by fascism. He said: "I'm writing about what's happening now, about people searching for beliefs in what is no longer a religious country, and about how individuals of charisma and power can polarise things."[14]
A full length study of his work, Stephen Poliakoff: On Stage and Screen, was published in 2011 by Robin Nelson.[15]
Nearly all of Poliakoff's plays premiered in London, four at the National Theatre, four at the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the Almeida, Hampstead, Bush and Royal Court. Three of his plays have transferred to the West End. Many of the plays have been performed across Europe and also in the US, Australia and Japan.
In 2005, he renewed recent criticisms of BBC scheduling and commissioning policy, arguing that the reintroduction of a regular evening slot for one-off plays on BBC1 would provide the re-invigoration of drama output that has become a priority for the corporation.
In 2011, Poliakoff wrote a seven-minute short film, Astonish Me, to celebrate WWF's 50th anniversary. Starring Bill Nighy and Gemma Arterton, the film was shown in Odeon Cinemas in August 2011 and made available on the WWF website and YouTube.[33]
In February and March 2013, Dancing on the Edge,[34] a five-part series which followed the fortunes of a black jazz band in 1930s London, was broadcast by the BBC, and also later won a Golden Globe.[35]
Poliakoff wrote and directed Summer of Rockets, a semi-autobiographical six-part series broadcast by the BBC in June 2019. It is set in 1958, just as the UK is testing its first hydrogen bomb, and focuses on a Russian Jewish hearing aid inventor (Toby Stephens) who goes to work for MI5.[39] It also stars Keeley Hawes, Linus Roache, and Timothy Spall.[40]
His brother, Sir Martyn Poliakoff, a research chemist and lecturer, is a Fellow of the Royal Society,[42] being, until November 2016, its Foreign Secretary and vice-president.[43] He is also the presenter of a YouTube educational series on chemistry, The Periodic Table of Videos.[44]
Poliakoff's paternal grandfather, Joseph, was a Russian Jew who experienced first-hand the effects of the communist revolution in Russia from the family's Moscow flat across from the Kremlin.[45] Near starvation after the revolution, he was given a government job as a district telephone inspector from an admiring commissar and he helped build Moscow's first automatic telephone exchange.[45] He then fled with his family from the Soviet Union to the UK in 1924.[46][47]
Joseph Poliakoff was an inventor of electrical devices[48] whose many inventions included a selenium photograph telephony shutter in 1899 (US patent 700,100, 26 August 1901),[49][50] which, along with electrical sound amplification, allowed for synchronised audio on film, the radio volume control, a magnetic induction loop that allowed hearing-impaired people to hear in auditoriums or theatres,[51][52] and the paging beeper.[53] He also founded the Multitone Electric Company of London in 1931 that produced hearing aid devices[54] with their most prestigious customer being Winston Churchill.[53] Joseph's experiences under the Bolsheviks inspired Poliakoff's 1984 play Breaking the Silence.[55] Several of these attributes (such as the pager, and hearing aids, including Churchill's) were ascribed to the lead character in Summer of Rockets.
^"Theatre Plays". Stephen Poliakoff Official Website. Archived from the original on 13 January 2017. Retrieved 11 January 2017.
^ abcPeacock, D. Keith (1984). "The Fascination of Fascism: The Plays of Stephen Poliakoff". Modern Drama. 27 (4): 494–505. doi:10.3138/md.27.4.494. S2CID162295614.
^US 2252641, Oswald, Barber Sneath & Poliakoff, Joseph, "Method of and apparatus for the transmission of speech and other sounds", published 12 August 1941
