Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3

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"You've been here before?": Space and Memory in Stephen Poliakoff's Dramas / Elizabeth Robertson

Keywords: Place & Space; Literature; Television & Film.

<1> The relationship between space, place and memory is longstanding. Frances Yates discusses the origins and practice of mnemonics in The Art of Memory, where she outlines the establishment of the use of space and place to remember. Following the story of Simonides of Ceos, Yates discusses how the art of memory was established after Simonides was refused full payment for a victory ode given in honour of his host - a nobleman named Scopas - on account of the number of dedications to the mythical twins Castor and Pollux. Sometime later Simonides was called out of the palace to meet two visitors - later revealed to be Castor and Pollux themselves - and while he was absent the roof of the banqueting hall collapsed, killing all inside. As the only person not killed Simonides was called upon to name the dead; he did so by recalling where each person was sat in the hall. Thus, the method of loci, or the memory palace, was created (Yates 1-3). The method of loci was used in rhetoric: "as a technique by which the orator could improve his memory, which would enable him to deliver long speeches from memory with unfailing accuracy" (Yates 2). The interest here in the method of loci is in the way in which it uses space and place as a means for remembering. In doing so it establishes a relationship between space and memory, because it creates a means whereby real-and-imagined spaces might assist us in acts of remembering - whether public or private - when revisiting the past, because the method 'houses' memory.

<2> Since the late twentieth century the work of the British writer-director Stephen Poliakoff has centred upon an examination of memory, history and historical consciousness. Space and place have played an important role in the ways in which Poliakoff dramatizes his memory-narratives, particularly in his television dramas. Since the early 1970s Poliakoff has been established as a distinctive voice in British drama. Over the last forty years he has produced a body of work across the mediums of theatre, film and television, exploring a variety of themes including the post-war urban environment, the lure of extremist politics, technology in contemporary Britain, and the recurring themes of family, history and memory. Amongst Poliakoff's most critically successful work has been the television work he has made for the BBC since 1999, in which Poliakoff has developed a distinctive textual and visual style. Poliakoff has advocated the importance of making quality drama for television, whilst maintaining a presence both as writer and director in theatre and film, and occupying an enviable position in which he has artistic control over the work he makes. Poliakoff is perhaps best known for the high profile dramas he has made for the BBC - including Caught on a Train (1980), Shooting the Past (1999), Perfect Strangers (2001), The Lost Prince (2003), Gideon's Daughter (2005), Joe's Palace and Capturing Mary (2007). Using close-reading and theoretical work about space and memory by critics including Gaston Bachelard and Edward S. Casey - themselves building upon Henri Bergson's theories of memory - this article will analyze how Poliakoff layers dialogue, voice-overs, flashbacks, still photographs, and visual repetition within spaces to merge past and present. The relationship between space and memory will be explored to consider how memories are 'housed' within space in Poliakoff's work by focusing on scenes from the BBC television dramas Perfect Strangers (2001) and Capturing Mary (2007), as well as examining the importance of space and memory to dramaturgical structure and use of performance space in the stage dramas Blinded by the Sun (1996) and My City (2011).

<3> Sarah Cardwell argues that the medium of television has facilitated Poliakoff's development of the "intermedia, cross-temporal, montage" which has become a recognizable feature in his dramas, enabling him to "traverse spatial and temporal boundaries," and forge links "between images and moments" to "emphasise their interconnectedness" (Cardwell 180). Poliakoff uses the montages Cardwell describes in Perfect Strangers and Capturing Mary when characters revisit a space - in both cases a large London mansion house - after a number of years. The visit in Perfect Strangers is instigated at a family reunion weekend when the central character, Daniel Symon (Matthew Macfadyen), is shown a previously unseen photograph of himself as a young boy dressed as a prince and stood on the staircase of the family's London townhouse. Intrigued by the photograph, Daniel attempts to understand why he was dressed in such a way, by whom, and for what purpose. In his search ancestral spaces are an important element of the recovery of memory. Poliakoff uses the ancestral homes of the Symon family - places which have been abandoned awaiting sale or already cast off - to function as spaces where events can be reconstructed and the ongoing process of memory restoration can be finalized by the recovery of what has been forgotten.

<4> The process which Daniel undertakes in trying to decipher his photograph is described by Annette Kuhn as 'memory work'; a process that anyone with sufficient interest in making sense of mysterious family artefacts can undertake to do:

Memory work requires the most minimal resources and the very simplest procedures. Making do with what is to hand - its raw materials are almost universally available - is the hallmark of memory work's pragmatism and democracy. Anyone who has a family photograph that exerts an enigmatic fascination or arouses an inexplicable depth of emotion could find memory work rewarding. (Kuhn 6)

The enigmatic photograph - such as the photograph of Daniel - is especially powerful in igniting curiosity because the photograph offers a frozen moment in time which contains traces of the past and of the future. It is the particular moment of the photograph which is unexplained, who took the photograph, when and why? Through Daniel's explorations in Perfect Strangers, Poliakoff offers a combination of different aspects of historian Ronald D. Lambert's 'experiential pathway' in the practice of family history. The raw materials of the family artefact and the ancestral space converge; the 'big house' occupies the drama as a place of memory - a physical, and imaginative, space where past and present collide. The 'big house' in Perfect Strangers is a space which might serve as a Proustian mechanism for the recovery of childhood memories. By examining the relationship between the house and memory, it can be revealed how these memories are 'housed' within this space. Kuhn writes:

The past is gone for ever. We cannot return to it, nor can we reclaim it now as it was. But that does not mean it is lost to us. The past itself is like the scene of a crime: if the deed itself is irrecoverable, its traces may still remain. (Kuhn 3-4)

History is gone, the events have taken place and cannot be relived, but they can be reconstructed from traces of memory, material objects, and by experiencing spaces and places within spaces. In her work on family history on British television, Amy Holdsworth argues "what we are left with is the search for presence in absence" (Holdsworth 79). Daniel knows almost nothing about his wider family, or the Symon family history, repeatedly attesting to his ignorance; the reunion he attends comes at the moment when the family patriarch - Ernest (Peter Howell) - is shedding the remaining family properties and along with them the public and measurable image of the family's heritage. The reunion becomes a defining moment in the family's reassessment of itself - both past and present. In light of this reassessment the crystallisation of the Symon family history moves from a - slightly skewed - focus on the outward characterisation of the family as wealthy and influential, to a more inclusive understanding of the family's breadth and diversity, and along with it, acceptance of oddity and non-conformity within it.

<5> For Daniel, the house functions as an ancestral space where the recovery of lost childhood memories can - at least - be prompted through reconstruction and feats of personal detective work. Lambert's definition of what he calls the 'experiential pathway' includes reference to ancestral landscapes and to experiencing these places kinetically. The Symon family town house is used as an ancestral site of memory and history in Perfect Strangers by Daniel not only to connect to the family's past, but also to help him to understand the photograph he is shown by the self-appointed Symon family archivist - Stephen Symon. Stephen shows Daniel some intriguing photographs taken of him as a young boy, dressed as a prince, standing on a staircase in the Grosvenor Place house. Neither Daniel, nor his parents, can recall him ever being dressed like this, or taking him to visit the 'big' London house. Daniel initially questions whether the photograph is in fact of him; even after being told it is him as a child, by both Stephen and his parents, Daniel asks again if they are sure. Daniel's uncertainty about the photograph is indicative of his inability to recall it being taken, or remember why he was dressed in such a way. Daniel's lack of memory of the event is reinforced in the scene which follows his session with Stephen, when he tries to explain the photograph to his cousins Charles and Rebecca: "There was this fantastic picture of me as a boy … it's just I have no memory of it being taken or how I came to look like that…" (Poliakoff, Perfect Strangers 36).

<6> While Sue Vice has argued that the narrative of Perfect Strangers "rests on a conception of the photograph as more reliable than memory" (Vice 304), it is important to note the memories which Perfect Strangers is concerned with are from the principal characters' childhoods. Furthermore, as the plot reveals, the photographs are connected to his grandfather's ongoing affair with his sister-in-law, something which Daniel - as a five-year-old child - is unlikely to have understood. The photograph does not serve as a memory replacement, and Poliakoff does not rely upon the pictures to fully reveal the memories associated with them; rather the photographs act as a prompt, something akin to the famous madeleine in Proust's Swann's Way. Looking at the photographs does not prompt Daniel to remember when the pictures were taken or why he was dressed as a little prince; the photograph serves only as evidence of something having taken place in the house when Daniel was a boy; the images intrigue Daniel and his parents, but they are baffled by what they see. In Swann's Way the taste of a madeleine cake allows the narrator to have detailed, and powerful recollections from his childhood, which he was not able to voluntarily remember merely by seeing the cakes. Key to this involuntary memory is a sensory stimulus - in this case taste: "The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it…" (Proust 61). Like the narrator inSwann's Way, Daniel needs another sensory stimulus beyond just seeing the photograph of himself as a boy. The stimulus in Perfect Strangers comes when his cousins Charles and Rebecca invite Daniel to visit the Grosvenor Street house with them. Perfect Strangers reflects that we do not remember, or understand, everything from our pasts. Further to this, the collective nature of family reminiscence through shared conversation is lacking here because his father, Raymond (Michael Gambon), has removed himself, and therefore Daniel, from the wider family. Poliakoff does not offer the photograph as more reliable than personal memory in Perfect Strangers, but it is placed in the drama as a raw material of memory work - an object to arouse curiosity. If the photograph is offered by Poliakoff as more reliable than human memory, then it should be taken as a warning about the problem associated with using digital or archival objects to store our memories for us. The photograph can only work as a reliable store of memory if people can actually recall the circumstances of the photograph upon seeing it, or deciphering it with other people who do remember. Without this, the photograph remains an unexplained material object which has captured a forgotten moment frozen in time.

<7> When Charles and Rebecca invite Daniel to the house with them in the early hours of the morning, he is given the opportunity to visit the location of his photograph. Memory, Edward S. Casey argues, is "naturally place-orientated or at least place-supported" (Casey 186-187), noting that while we rarely remember the dates of events we usually recall the places where things took place (Casey 214). Perfect Strangers demonstrates how memory can be place-orientated. "Thanks to the house", writes Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, "a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it is has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated" (Bachelard 8). The London town house in Perfect Strangers is such a house. The memory 'housed' within it is primarily associated with the grand staircase at the centre of the house, as well as some items which Daniel discovers discarded in a large cupboard in a disused room. On first entering the house Daniel still does not remember being there as a child, but when Charles shows him the hallway in the shut off, unoccupied, part of the house, Daniel sees the grand central staircase, and begins to recognise it as the staircase on which he is stood in the photograph. At the beginning of this scene, as Charles, Rebecca and Daniel enter the hall in the darkness; the audience glimpse the beginnings of the wrought iron railings of a staircase. In the unlit space the audience's focus is drawn fleetingly to these railings, and the potential usefulness of the house to Daniel, in his attempt to remember, is hinted at; when Charles switches on the lights we are drawn back to the characters. This scene is the first of two occasions when Daniel visits the house in the drama, it lasts just under a minute and contains seventeen different shots which layer past and present, moving image and still photograph, using shifting and repetitive points of view, shadows on walls, flashbacks and sound effects to create a sense of fragmentation, emphasising how difficult it is for Daniel to remember being in the house.

<8> Daniel replicates the photograph of him as a young boy - attempting to use the space to recall the events that took place there, what he was doing there and why he was dressed in such a way. When Daniel first reaches the point on the staircase where he is standing in the photograph, he imitates the pose his five-year-old self has in the photograph. Daniel then sits on a step, making himself approximately the same height as he is in the picture, and peers through the ornate railings, in the same way he is looking through the railings in the photograph. The scene constantly cuts between Daniel's point of view looking down the stairs at Charles and Rebecca, to Charles and Rebecca's point of view looking up the stairs at Daniel, mirroring the points of view of the five-year-old Daniel in the photograph and the unseen person holding the camera. These changing points of view are interspersed with close-ups of the black and white photograph.

<9> When Rebecca asks Daniel if he can remember what was happening - implying that being sat in the same space as he is stood in the photograph might have helped him to recover his memories of what was happening - the twelfth shot of the scene cuts to Daniel's point of view looking down through the railings, before he turns away to look around the rest of the space; shot thirteen cuts to a close up of Daniel's face in the grainy black and white photograph peering through the railings, with background sounds of children laughing, before the fourteenth shot cuts back to a close-up of Daniel in the present day, again looking through the railings. These repetitive close-ups of Daniel both in the present day and in the photograph, Daniel looking around the space and touching the railings, coupled with Rebecca's question - "Can you remember it now? Can you remember what was happening?" (Poliakoff, Perfect Strangers 58) - firmly root the memory of the event at that particular point within the house, implying that Daniel's memory is 'housed' in this space.

<10> Bachelard writes: "Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are" (Bachelard 9). This, however, is a problem for Daniel, because his memory is not securely fixed in this space - as far as he is aware the photograph is evidence of the only time he visited this house, and even returning to the same space only helps Daniel remember a very tiny fraction of what might have taken place. 'No - it won't come back' is his response to Rebecca's question (Poliakoff, Perfect Strangers 58). In the scenes following the key scene on the staircase, Charles and Rebecca continue to show Daniel the house - which is both impressive and shabby, locked up and waiting to be disposed of, it only contains dust, debris and the ghosts of its past. Rummaging in a large cupboard Daniel and Rebecca discover one of the shoes Daniel is wearing in the photograph. For Daniel the shoe represents evidence that he was in the house, but the shoe itself does not assist any further in Daniel's recovery of his memories of being in the house.

<11> On Daniel's second visit to the house - to see his aunt Alice (Lindsay Duncan) in the third part of the drama - there is another scene on the staircase. This scene is considerably less visually complicated: there are no cuts between past and present, the cuts to and from different shots, and points of view, are less repetitive and less frequent, the scene does not layer past and present, or sound over the present day noises and dialogue, the camera's point of view of Daniel is shot at a wider angle, and the photograph does not make an appearance. A key difference between this scene and the earlier scene is this scene is set during daylight hours when the house is more fully exposed, holding fewer mysteries in the light, fewer possibilities for dreaming. However, the cuts between Alice's point of view and Daniel's, mirror - again - that of Daniel as a boy looking down the stairs and the photographer looking up. Daniel's discovery on this visit takes place at the large cupboard where he finds another part of his discarded costume - this time the ruff, which acts as a further prompt, and the scene cuts to a flashback of the five year old Daniel watching a group of children dressed as pirates playing a party game. The house, however, holds no further clues for Daniel in uncovering the mystery behind his photograph, and he does not return there.

<12> The plot of Agatha Christie's final Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, which was first published posthumously, but is likely to have been written during the Blitz, between 1940 and 1941, also centres upon a fragmented childhood memory of something witnessed whilst peering through the banisters. The recently married Gwenda Reed returns to England after spending most of her childhood with her mother's family in New Zealand, to find a home for Gwenda and her husband Giles. Deciding to settle somewhere on the south coast, Gwenda buys a house in the fictitious Dillmouth, which she instantly feels at home in. Having moved in, there is something, however, which troubles Gwenda about the house: it seems too familiar - she is aware of doors which have been blocked up, recalls exactly the design of the wallpaper in the nursery long since painted over, and on her first viewing of the house Gwenda had a peculiar sensation when walking down the stairs: "They were starting down the stairs when quite suddenly Gwenda felt a wave of irrational terror sweep over her. It was a sickening sensation, and it passed almost as quickly as it came" (Christie 11). After moving in, Gwenda becomes increasingly unnerved by her familiarity with the house, and flees to London to visit her husband's cousins, where she meets Miss Marple, and collectively they attend a performance of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. On hearing the line "Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle, she died young", in Act iv Scene 2 of the play, Gwenda screams, leaps to her feet and runs out of the theatre. The following morning Miss Marple manages to coax Gwenda into explaining what happened, and why she was so frightened:

'You'll think I'm hysterical or queer or something. It happened quite suddenly, right at the end. I'd enjoyed the play. I'd never thought once about the house. And then it came - out of the blue - when he said those words -'

She repeated in a low quivering voice: 'Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle, she died young'

'I was back there - on the stairs, looking down on the hall through the banisters, and I saw her lying there. Sprawled out - dead. Her hair all golden and her face all - all blue! She was dead, strangled, and someone was saying those words in that same horrible gloating way - and I saw his hands - grey, wrinkled - not hands - monkey's paws… It was horrible, I tell you. She was dead…' (Christie 26)

It transpires that Gwenda as a very young girl lived in the Dillmouth house for a year with her father and stepmother, and from the staircase, whilst peering through the banisters she witnessed the murder of her stepmother. When Gwenda returns to the house with her husband, Giles, he attempts to get Gwenda to re-enact where she was standing as a child to see if it can help her recall everything which happened, in much the same way Daniel re-enacts his pose in the photograph:

'Where do you think the body was? About here?' asked Giles,

He and Gwenda were standing in the front hall of Hillside. They had arrived back
the night before, and Giles was now in full cry. He was as pleased as a small boy
with his new toy.

'Just about,' said Gwenda. She retreated up the stairs and peered down critically.

'Yes - I think that is about it.'

'Crouch down,' said Giles. 'You were only about three years old you know.'

Gwenda crouched obligingly. (Christie 42)

While there are some similarities between Perfect Strangers and Sleeping Murder - the association of memory with space, the main characters inability to voluntarily recall the full details immediately, the need for other people to help interpret the fragments of memory, the re-enactment of where and how they were standing on the staircases - Daniel, unlike Gwenda (with the crucial exception of the identity of the murderer), never fully recalls what took place at the house, and eventually he has to rely upon his father and Stephen Symon to interpret the photographs and piece together events from the past.

<13> It should be noted that the sites revisited in Poliakoff's drama and Christie's novel are the locations of rather different events: Daniel's photograph is eventually revealed to be a symbol of the ongoing love between his grandfather and his grandfather's brother's wife, where Gwenda's experiences are of a traumatic event - the witnessing of a murder. Both stories, however, make a similar use of space. In Sleeping Murder, experiencing the space is not enough for Gwenda to recall what she saw, and she requires an external prompt to remember; in Perfect Strangers, the photograph alone is not a prompt but it is sufficiently mysterious as to tempt Daniel to want to decipher it; the photograph and the house together allow Daniel to begin to recall being in the house. Visiting the house and experiencing its interior space provides Daniel with sensory stimuli - visually and physically: sitting on the stairs, touching the railings, the sight and feel of the discarded shoe and ruff, all help Daniel to recall being in the house as a child, but crucially he does not completely remember everything at this point in the drama; specifically he cannot recall the photograph being taken, nor by whom. It must be asked, then, if Daniel's memories are 'housed' in this space? Bachelard says in The Poetics of Space that the more rooted memories are in a fixed space, the sounder they are. Daniel's memories are clearly not securely fixed in this space; he is not able to voluntarily recall the events there.

<14> There is, however, a clear connection in Perfect Strangers between this space, this particular house and its staircase, and Daniel's memories. Once he encounters the space, Daniel is able to recover some involuntary memories of the event. Bachelard refers repeatedly to 'home', and the 'house in which we are born'; Daniel's inability to fully recollect, may result from his having no emotional relationship with this house - he was not born there, did not grow up there, and apparently only visited it once as a child. The relationship between space and memory in Perfect Strangers is clear, but in the drama space does not act as a complete and powerful mechanism or stimulus for total memory recall. Instead Poliakoff uses the space, and the medium he is working in, to create a ghost-like atmosphere of fragmented memories fleetingly remembered. Daniel's search for an explanation of the circumstances of his photograph is, as Holdsworth argues historical and investigative memory narratives on television often are, a search for "presence in absence" (Holdsworth 79).

<15> In revisiting the empty house, Daniel is searching for something which is no longer there. Daniel's search in this space for presence in absence is an attempt to fill a gap in his knowledge of his family history, and in using the house to help discover the story behind his photograph Daniel creates presence in absence because he recreates the photograph in a space that has essentially been abandoned. Perfect Strangers presents a complicated memory narrative in which space, object, archive, knowledge and fragmented memories come together. Where empty interior domestic space plays a key role in the recuperation of memory in Perfect Strangers, such spaces play a more cathartic role in the narrative of Capturing Mary: Mary's strong emotional relationship with the house means her memories, unlike Daniel's, are firmly fixed in the space. Like the house in Perfect Strangers, the house in Capturing Mary is empty, and Mary uses the empty space to find meaning in her past and to confront her memories. Joe's Palace - the companion drama to Capturing Mary - establishes the reasons for the house lying empty. The house belongs to Elliot Graham (Michael Gambon) having been left to him by his billionaire father. Graham, who has become a recluse, regards his father's mansion with a great deal of suspicion, seeing it as the outward representation of his father's questionable business dealings with the Nazis in the 1930s before the outbreak of the Second World War. Unable to come to terms with how his father made his money, Graham lives in a house on the opposite side of the road, leaving the mansion house empty but immaculately kept. But an 'aura' of something unpleasant associated with the house results in an ever dwindling staff, until the only person left working there is the seventeen-year-old doorman, Joe (Danny Lee-Wynter), whose main task appears to be to keep people out.

<16> The narrative of Capturing Mary intersects with the events of Joe's Palace, and in Joe's opening voice-over in Capturing Mary the audience is informed that no one is allowed to enter without the express permission of the reclusive owner, but when Mary (Maggie Smith) unexpectedly arrives at the door one day Joe breaks the rules and lets her in. The interconnecting narratives of Capturing Mary and Joe's Palace reveal that the house and its contents are not only representative of the intersections between public history and individual lives, but the house is also the space Mary pinpoints has the location where she encounters the mysterious and disturbing Greville White (David Walliams) with devastating personal consequence. Capturing Mary offers a narrative which moves temporally in the same space.

<17> The title sequence of Capturing Mary begins inside the house, with a shot above the ground floor entrance hall, taking in the staircase and the ornate mosaic flooring below. As the camera slowly turns in an anti-clockwise spiral motion the image of the staircase appears to rotate in a clockwise motion as if the viewer were descending the stairs. The sequence then cuts to a close-up panning shot of a number of pairs of old shoes - for all occasions - before the camera pans round to a doorway, which leads to a series of empty rooms, which appear static but immaculate, as if in a museum. The sequence then cuts to a close-up of the mosaic flooring of the entrance hall. As the opening narrative voice-over given by Joe begins, the camera follows the line of the central pattern on the floor and then back up the staircase, maintaining the close-up focus as if the viewer were ascending them. As the shot reaches the top of the stairs Joe comes into view, sat on the top stair looking down, thinking back on his earlier decision to let Mary into the house, before cutting back in time, to a shot of Mary (Maggie Smith) seen through the hatch of the front door from Joe's point of view. Having been let into the house and persuaded by Joe to have some tea, Mary - nervous and awkward - sits in the hallway glancing around the space until the open door of a room off the hall catches her attention and the camera follows Mary's gaze through the space. Simultaneously the scene is overlaid with the sound of a persistent tapping - the hollow tap of a table tennis ball - before the sound of opera singing is introduced.

<18> Within the same space two temporal zones exist in tandem: we have Mary sat in the hall in the present looking down towards a room which is also in the present, but on screen we see and hear the past in this room. The movement between close-up shots of Mary looking towards the camera and down the corridor whilst remembering a past event which took place in this room, and shots which begin as wide angle shots of the room's doorway in the present, before the camera moves down the corridor and closer to the door as the past then appears on screen, result in a sequence which sees Mary looking back directly into her past whilst sat in, and experiencing, the space. Onscreen the space of past and present merge and move seamlessly from one to the other. Mary is transfixed, taken right back to her past and the parties she used to attend at the house. This scene shows how a familiar location can evoke events that took place in it; revisiting the house means Mary revisits the past. The tapping of the table tennis ball increases both in sound and speed before the ball itself rolls across the floor, as if it is in the space in the present day rolling past Mary's feet. The sequence lasts approximately forty-five seconds and features fifteen shots moving between Mary in the present and the view of the room in both past and present and is only interrupted when the loud bang of the table tennis ball coincides with Mary knocking the milk jug off the tea table.

<19> Joe realises from Mary's behaviour that something must have happened in the house. Mary denies it but this discussion leads to Mary explaining why she was invited to the extremely select parties held at the house - as a young novelist and culture critic for the newspapers. The story moves from room to room; but it is the first room that is the most significant, because it is the room in which we are first introduced to Greville. The sequence of shots moves from present to past showing the house as it was in the 1950s, and the scenes which accompany Mary's explanation show Greville weaving around the room with ease talking to those gathered there, whilst the younger Mary (Ruth Wilson) observes him from a distance, intrigued, until at one party it seems that Greville might be making his way across the room to speak to her. Mary escapes to the kitchen on the pretence of getting a glass of water only to find that Greville appears in the kitchen doorway; and so began a mysterious, and unnerving, acquaintance between the two. Joe moves off to go down to the kitchen to "see where it happened" (Poliakoff, Capturing Mary 133). When they arrive in the room, Mary comments that it has hardly changed, appearing as if it had been preserved (Poliakoff, Capturing Mary 134). The house seems as if it has been frozen in time, a still life snapshot of an earlier era, and an air of preservation permeates the whole house, creating an atmosphere of haunting.

<20> By this point in the past, Mary and Greville have moved off to the cellar. In this dark and oppressive space Mary and Greville discuss the significance of the years in which certain wines were bottled - the early 1900s foreshadowing the war to come, the stock market crash of 1929, the continuation of wine making through the Second World War - until Greville unexpectedly reveals a number of horrific secret stories about high profile members of society. The stories haunt Mary even decades later: "I have never been able to get them out of my head - I find myself thinking about then nearly every week, even now" (Poliakoff, Capturing Mary 141). As Mary leaves Greville in the cellar corridors in the past, Mary and Joe arrive there in the present day. From here the narrative of Capturing Mary follows a pattern where Mary tells her story to Joe as they move through the house, with the sequences set in the past taking place almost one place ahead of Mary and Joe's location within the house. Believing Greville now has some hold over her - particularly since she has a sense that he could damage her professional prospects - Mary becomes convinced that she needs to extract herself from Greville's grasp. But when the opportunity arises one night when Mary is staying in the house and Greville arrives at her bedroom door with glasses filled with strawberries, Mary finds herself unable to unsettle him. Instead Greville offers Mary a key to his house. Despite Greville urging her not to refuse the key, Mary cannot come to terms with the strangeness of the situation and refuses the key, pushing him out of the room and shutting the door in his face. The following morning Mary leaves the house, refusing an invitation from Greville to have dinner with him.

<21> It is at this point that we move outside the house for the first time, into a London park, as Mary walks alone, having returned home from travels abroad, whilst Mary in the present day explains to Joe how her career in journalism collapsed, believing it was systematically destroyed by Greville following her rejection of him. Mary only returns to the house years later when she accompanies her lover, a fashionable artist, to one of Mr Graham's parties. The story then moves into another part of the house, a hideous 1960s conservatory, where again she watches Greville from a distance, surprised that he is there. When Joe and Mary enter the empty conservatory, Joe cannot understand why Mary did not confront Greville there. Mary, however, realises that she is not at the party in her own right and this realisation is juxtaposed with shots of Greville circulating the room from Mary's point-of-view, re-emphasising the connection between Mary's fall from her position as the 'voice of youth' and Greville's undefined powers within the world he moves in. At the party Mary witnesses a young man tell Greville that his assessment of culture is: "complete crap! Everything you've said is just utter bollocks!" (Poliakoff, Capturing Mary 169). Realising that she was unable reject Greville so absolutely when she refused his house key, and that because of this Greville still has some hold over her, Mary flees the party. Finding herself unable to write without returning to her encounter with Greville in the cellar, she sinks slowly into alcoholism. Walking on the park on the morning of her visit to the house Mary believes she sees Greville there - whether she does see him, or whether she merely imagines him is not clear, but it is this encounter which leads her back to the house that day.

<22> Unlike Daniel, Mary's problem is not that she cannot remember, but that she remembers too well and has allowed her past to destroy her career. The way in which the story moves through the house to instigate a new episode of Mary's memory is not as complicated as the way in which space is used in Perfect Strangers to re-enact the past. Where Perfect Strangers used space to recuperate memory, Capturing Mary uses space to confront memory. Indeed Mary says this herself:

And somehow I forced myself here … something I've been thinking about for years - to come back here, and confront the place … To see if I could get rid of a ghost - which isn't a ghost, of course. Not a proper ghost. (Poliakoff, Capturing Mary 192)

The 'big house' offers a traditional location for haunting. As can be seen in Perfect Strangers and Capturing Mary Poliakoff uses empty domestic spaces within urban 'big house' locations in his television dramas as places that are 'haunted' not by paranormal activity, but by the lost, suppressed, or overwhelming memories of events from individual characters' pasts. But, as Mary herself notes, "this isn't a ghost story" (Poliakoff, Capturing Mary 186).

<23> While Capturing Mary takes a more straightforward route to using space to tell a memory-narrative than Perfect Strangers, when the dual narratives of Joe's Palace and Capturing Mary are considered together, the house itself becomes a space which is representative of the memory of public trauma and private anguish. The relationship between the acquisition of wealth - of which the house is a product - and the Third Reich, mean that the house is an ancestral space which both houses, and is haunted by, the spectre of the Holocaust. As the site of Mary's quietly destructive encounters with Greville, it is also haunted - as Mary herself is - by her memories of a lost career, and a wasted life. Furthermore the house itself is a space which haunts Mary; she enters tentatively, and resists Joe's first attempts to show her around the house, but through her behaviour it becomes clear to the audience that not only has Mary been there before, but the house represents some sort of internalized horror from her past. Where Daniel's memories were not sufficiently fixed in space, Mary's are locked in and attached securely to the house. Mary's resistance to the house is not a resistance to recuperating a memory of what took place there (Mary clearly remembers what took place there), but is instead a resistance to confronting it. Nonetheless as soon as she enters the space Mary's memories rise up and as she and Joe walk around the house each room prompts the telling of an episode of a significant encounter with Greville and builds Mary's memory-narrative. Where in Joe's Palace Mr Graham's distrust of the social and economic circumstances that enabled his father's acquisition of the house is influenced by his own sense of historical consciousness of an event from public history, Mary's story is predicated upon a sense of place consciousness. Re-entering the location of her encounters with Greville is a process Mary needed to go through so that she could attempt to cast off the ghost of Greville - a ghost which has been looming over her for most of her adult life.

<24> While the televisual medium means, as Cardwell has noted, Poliakoff can achieve visual effects on screen which transcend temporal boundaries because the time zones of past and present can exist simultaneously on screen, it is important to remember these sequences - which are characteristic of Poliakoff's dramas and can be seen in Perfect Strangers and Capturing Mary - take place within spaces, and that the spatial boundaries in these houses offer a structure within which past and present can be melded and scrutinized through Poliakoff's cross-temporal, intermedia, montages. It is space in both these drama which both enables and necessitates these layered montages. Poliakoff's use of space in these montages allows him to overcome issues with temporal boundaries on screen. While television offers the dramatist opportunities to work with visual media, Poliakoff has also successfully used performance space in some of his stage plays to contain multiple time zones. By using a technique in which past and present exist within the same narrative and performative space, Poliakoff opens up the possibilities for narrating memory on stage. As Patrice Pavis has noted, the difficulty of understanding time, space and action in live performance lies not in describing these terms separately, but in observing how time, space and action interact in performance. In the theatre time, space and action are interdependent - one cannot exist without the other two. Time and space are both fixed - the physical theatre space and the time of the performance - and intangible - the fictional time and place on stage. Action adds yet more layers to this; both action which is performed and action which is imagined (Pavis 148). Time, space, and action are not merely about what appears, or takes place, on stage. Theatre space is shared space. The performance, the performers, and the audience occupy the same physical space; the time and space of the events unfolding onstage and the 'real' time and space co-exists with the theatrical time and space beyond the world created inside the auditorium by the audience and the performance. Plays such as Blinded by the Sun (1996), where Poliakoff makes use of a retrospective character-narrator structure, complicate this still further, creating a dual temporality within the performance: the time of the narration and the time of the action, where events which have already taken place in time and space in the time of the narration, are recalled in the present, all of which takes place in the same space both onstage and in the drama's narrative.

<25> During a scene towards the end of the play one character - Elinor - is on one side of the stage where she is located in the narrative of the past - which is the time of the action ­- and the character-narrator, Al, is located in another part of the space, having stepped out of the time of the action to enter the present - the time of narration - to narrate Elinor's future (an event which has already taken place in Al's past, but has not taken place in the time of the action), the play occupies past (Al's past and the past which is the time of the action), present (Al's present) and future (Elinor's future) simultaneously in this moment within the same performance space. In the staging of Al's final monologue in Blinded by the Sun the ways in which the time of the narration and the time of the action co-exist creates layers of time, action and narration within the same space. In a key scene in Poliakoff's 2011 play My City, a teacher, Mr Minken, tells the story of his father's escape from Nazi Germany. The scene provides a significant illustration of how Poliakoff uses the stage space to be simultaneously occupied by past and present. In the production at London's Almeida theatre in autumn 2011 - directed by Poliakoff himself - this scene was staged simply with no scenery bar a projected backdrop of a large railway clock, and no props aside from a leather suitcase and a small model aeroplane. The importance - and complications - of time in this scene looms large. Time is layered in space: there is the present time of the performance and the present time of the main narrative strand of the play, within which the time of Minken's story takes place in the past, with finally the historical time of the story Minken is telling. For the duration of the monologue four temporal strands occupy the same space, the passing and the pressures of time amplified by the large clock on the back wall of the stage. In television or cinema attempts to create multiple time and space, on screen simultaneously, typically result in the use of split screen or flashbacks or multiple cuts between scenes and locations: Poliakoff uses the intermedia montage for the same purpose mirroring his use of performance space in the theatre, creating a more detailed and visually complex way of visualizing and dramatizing memory. In theatre multiple time and action can occupy the same space simultaneously, and in these scenes from his plays Poliakoff explores the ways in which time, space and action in the theatre can be used to create memory-narratives.

<26> Both Perfect Strangers and Capturing Mary create memory-narratives where memory is mapped onto space. By revisiting the empty houses, Daniel and Mary remember - each to a different extent - what took place there. Without space the memory-narrative cannot be told. To show what these memories are, and some of the processes of memory relating to certain physical senses - sight, touch and hearing - Poliakoff uses montages of layered media and sound to visually and aurally evoke the characters' memories within space. In his examination of memory Casey analyzes 'body memory' as how we are in the world, and 'place memory' as where we are in the world. Daniel and Mary's return to the spaces of memory mean that they experience them physically - kinetically - as well as emotionally, bringing performative body memory and place memory together on screen. Daniel's re-enactment of the photograph in the space in which it was taken is a process of what Casey calls "performative" remembering (Casey 148), whereas Mary's return to the house to confront the place, and her memories, shows an understanding that space/place is "a container of experiences" as well as being where "the past can revive and survive" (Casey 186-187). Poliakoff makes use of the big house setting in both dramas to construct memory-narratives where the house acts as both memory trigger and memory location. By exploring the relationship between memory, space and place, Poliakoff's dramas echo - with a focus on private history and memory - Philip J. Ethington's argument that "historical interpretation" might be reconceived "as the act of reading places, or topi" (Ethington 466). Poliakoff's dramas on stage and screen make sophisticated use of space and place to present multiple narrative strands and memory-narratives, in which space becomes a container for past experiences. Through the fragmentary lens of personal experience in character-driven narratives Poliakoff explores individual microhistories which are embedded in characters' memories and strongly associated with their relationship with place and space as sites of memory. The static, empty, spaces in Perfect Strangers and Capturing Mary offer the characters the opportunity to revisit and reread the past through place and space. For memory to be sustained, retrieved and passed on, space and place must be experienced and re-experienced; without the physical experience of a given space, or place within space, both the survival and the retrieval of memory are put in jeopardy.

Works cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Print.

Cardwell, Sarah. "'Television Aesthetics' and Close Analysis: Style, Mood and Engagement in Perfect Strangers (Stephen Poliakoff, 2001)." Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film. Ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. 179-194. Print.

Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Print. Studies in Continental Thought.

Christie, Agatha. Sleeping Murder. Glasgow: Fontana, 1978. Print

Ethington, Philip J. "Placing the Past: 'Groundwork for a Spatial Theory of History." Rethinking History 11.4 (2007): 465-494. Print.

Holdsworth, Amy. Television, Memory, and Nostalgia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies.

Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso, 1995. Print.

Pavis, Patrice. Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance, and Film. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Print.

Poliakoff, Stephen. "Blinded by the Sun." Blinded by the Sun & Sweet Panic. London: Methuen Drama, 1996. 1-122. Print.

---. Capturing Mary. BBC, 2007. Film.

---. Joe's Palace and Capturing Mary. London: Methuen Drama, 2007. Print.

---. My City. London: Methuen Drama, 2011. Print.

---. Perfect Strangers. London: Methuen Drama, 2001. Print.

---. Perfect Strangers. BBC, 2001. Film.

Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way. London: Chatto and Windus, 1951. Print.

Vice, Sue. "Yellowing Snapshots: Photography and Memory in Holocaust Literature." Journal for Cultural Research 8.3 (2004): 293-316. Print.

Yates, Frances Amelia. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Print.

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