10.10.1996

Unsaleable discovery

Helen Ellis reviews Blinded by the sun by Stephen Poliakoff, directed by Ron Daniels (Cottosloe theatre, London)

Blinded by the sun is set in a musty and crumbling old university scientific research department. The set of huge, dark, solid and old wooden cupboards provides a backdrop.

As the eccentric, yet very ordinary research scientists are introduced, this play at first seems to be about demystifying science and our relationships. The inept scientist who plays the lead has made gods of all his colleagues. Through the course of the play he attempts to shatter their god-like images, but only through retreating into a new fantasy world. Only at the end do the characters approach closeness, but it is a relationship based on resignation and lives never to be realised.

The battle between resignation and action is never resolved in the play. But as the play unfolds it becomes obvious that this is not a simple tale of a cheating scientist being exposed or the mystification of science. The action that the characters take leads them into the death knell of a world that shuns exploration in favour of product.

The lead characters, portrayed by Douglas Hodge, Duncan Bell and Frances de la Tour, are played with a subtlety which converges with the seeping erosion of our ideals, constantly eluding, yet haunting us.

The characters are alienated from each other and thus from their ideals and science itself has become alienated. The scientists are all pursued by the need to produce results, to deliver a saleable product.

To exist in this environment they hurry or fake results, hide themselves away in secret or turn to cod pseudo-scientific, media-friendly ramblings. The rug is pulled from beneath all their feet, as their passion for discovery is constantly undermined by an intrinsically limiting society which they can neither escape nor fully live and breathe in.

Poliakoff describes a world in which “mystery is expensive”, in which Elinor asks, “Was I, am I the future?” - we see the future encased in the present and, more frighteningly, in Poliakoff’s grim vision relegated to the past. We are left with “just silence”. Only Elinor once had the stamina for the “dark tunnel” that she bore through a world looking for easy answers and neat patterns.

It only remains to be said that Poliakoff finds himself stuck in the confines of this alienated world, as West End ticket prices preclude the vast majority of the population from entering into his artistic exploration.

Helen Ellis