The appeasing Mr Poliakoff

Something of a prodigy, he wrote his first play at the age of fifteen—"sixteen actually, I was a bit older", he interjects with wry modesty. "It was a passion. I was drawn to the theatre from a very early age. I used to write stories as a child. I always loved writing. I originally wanted to become an actor but I had absolutely no talent. I was kicked out of the school play because I was so bad." Nonetheless, his early career was nothing short of "impressive", a term he himself shrugs off in casual agreement. 

Since then Stephen Poliakoff has written several films both for cinema and television, including The Lost Prince starring Michael Gambon and Bill Nighy, and Capturing Mary with Maggie Smith in the eponymous role. After ten years of intense work for the BBC, Glorious 39 heralds his return to the cinema. 

"I wasn’t planning on focusing on television for so long. I wrote a film and because it was successful they told me to write another one and then another and I just did it for a few years. It was very satisfying work. I always wanted to return to the cinema but the problem, especially in the 1990s, was the bad distribution of British films; there wasn’t enough money. It is changing now. Things have become easier in the past five or six years, but it’s still very tough."

Thanks to this new headway made by the British film industry, Poliakoff was finally able to write and direct a WWII film in a way that, he claims, "has never been dealt with in the cinema before".

Focusing on the appeasement movement both in the year leading up to and during WWII, Glorious 39 centres around Anne, played by the increasingly popular Romala Garai. As the adopted daughter of a Tory MP, she lives a sheltered life, dividing her time between her burgeoning acting career and family life in a beautiful country mansion. Initially oblivious to the rise of Nazism in Europe and the imminence of war, she is forced to face its realities when one of her friends—a young MP, played by David Tennant—is found dead. As Anne begins to suspect foul play, the plot spirals out even further to suggest that her own family might be conspiring against her. 

"I got interested in the subject of the appeasement relatively recently. British films and documentaries deal with the Holocaust but not the appeasers—the people who wanted to strike a deal with Hitler and stop the war. I wanted to show what a close run it was that we stood up to Hitler and that Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Things could have easily gone the other way. We avoided becoming a Vichy state by a whisker."

In order to portray the event in an "interesting way", Poliakoff constructs his plot with a Hitchcockian atmosphere of suspense and mystery. "People know that we won the war so I had to create suspense in a different way, surprise the audience, and challenge their expectations. They had to wonder what was going to happen next." 

The impressive cast— Tennant being joined by Bill Nighy, Jeremy Northam, Romola Garai, Julie Christie and Christopher Lee—is a distant fantasy for many other drooling British directors, but all in a day's work for Poliakoff, who is used to working with the big names of British cinema and television.

Of course Romola Garai might have appeared as an obvious choice after her acclaimed performances in Atonement or the latest BBC drama, Emma—a series written by Poliakoff’s wife Sandy Welsh. "The film was made immediately before Emma actually. I didn’t choose Romola. In my previous work, Capturing Mary, Ruth Wilson played the part of the young Mary, and she had been in Jane Eyre before that, which was also written by my wife. There are always two or three actors at the top and so they tend to be in demand. I was very lucky that Romola Garai was in vogue when we made the film." 

However, he did choose Bill Nighy, and even phoned him to offer him the part of Sir Alexander Keyes, Anne’s father. Not only so, but Poliakoff wrote the film with Bill Nighy in mind to play the role. Without knowing it, the actor was part of the adventure before it had even started. "We had worked together before on the set of The Lost Prince. It was a very happy collaboration. The film got three Emmys and his performance was fantastic. I wanted him to portray this man who is lovely and charming, and appears so to everyone including his daughter, but who is also hiding something."

For Poliakoff, Glorious 39 almost sounds like old news. He is already working on his next project: a stage play. An acrobat with his talents, Poliakoff is constantly flitting between writing and directing for television, cinema and theatre. 

He sounds a little nostalgic when he looks back on his early career and one of his first professional plays, Lay-By, performed at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1971. If he cannot exactly remember what the play was about—"the rape of a woman and the trial of her attacker" is his brief plot summary—it remains engraved in his memory as the trigger to his career as a professional playwright and the beginning of adulthood. "It all started in Edinburgh really. First at The Lyceum and then later Lay-By was performed at the Traverse. I was eighteen when I co-wrote it. It was a rather pornographic play, sexually explicit. I was the youngest writer and was a fairly innocent eighteen year old boy (he laughs). I had to look up words in the dictionary because I didn’t know what they meant."

Is he going to be back in Edinburgh to present his next play? "Why not?"