Financial Times, 30th
November 1989, Michael Coveney
In his last stage play, ‘Breaking the Silence’, Stephen Poliakoff sketched a Russian Jewish émigré family on a train; the engineering father spent his spare time inventing lenses for the coming cinema age. The make or break wheeze of Bill Galpin, a Nottingham electrical engineer, is a network of road rail vehicles, little ‘snouters,’ which can perform like Land Rovers and beetle around Africa.
This paradigm of the dotty scientist whose
inventions are despised in a society sceptical of technology bears an obvious
relationship to Clive Sinclair and his doomed fleet of C5 personal vehicles.
But Poliakoff elaborates the model to propose an epic drama involving a ruinous
defence of a libel suit in the High Court, a running battle with two children
in whom Galpin takes less interest than in his protégés, misfires property
schemes, and an attack on the reluctance of big business to support the ideas
wallahs.
Michael Pennington’s lean and self-obsessed boffin
manipulates the media to promote his wares and, incidentally his wider views.
Early success with an automatic turntable invention has led to other devices
such as inter-connecting angle poise lamps and oven gloves with holes in.
Galpin’s anguished point is that Britain lost the initiative with the jet
engine, penicillin, the computer, even an early form of Lego.
Analogies proliferate in a stonewalling scene with
a smooth investment executive (Ralph Fiennes). This place does not look like a
nerve-centre of research and development says Pennington, eyes raking the
dismal Pit. Invention is dying here because no-one will take the decisions. The
outside world senses only internal shambles; but things will soon change for
the better.
Ironically, Galpin’s arguments prompt an
explanation in court of Rachmanism, taking us straight back to Peter Flannery’s
‘Singer’ in the Swan, the best play of the year in spite of all its
imperfections, but one to which Poliakoff honourably relates. There are
marvellous scenes here between father and children, both of whom drop science
and engineering in favour of accountancy and art college. Lesley Sharp and
Simon Russell Beale translate, at last, their striking resemblance to each
other into sibling profitability.
Ron Daniels’ efficient production, moving across
two decades punctuated with evocative pop music, keeps the dialogue bubbling
and is good at charting the painful twists as Frances and Danny grow up and
apart from their father. Smartly glib superficiality, and a relish of the
material evidence of human pain in the environment, have long been Poliakoff
trademarks. He provides new beautiful horrors in the sight of a bride
surrounded by heat pumps and dwarf kidney machines to impress the prospective
clients on her big day; and in Kit Surrey’s mountainous pile of discarded
appliances and handy aids that have immunised Galpin, finally a Howard Hughes
recluse, against the claims of the heart.
Pennington’s very fine, wolf-like, keep-fit
performance also describes the tragedy of a man who cannot open his mouth
without preaching a false gospel and sounding like a crazy quack.
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