Capturing Mary, written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff. BBC2, Monday 12 November, 9pm
Television: for the most part you know you shouldn't. But sometimes, occasionally, something's on that you know is right; something that seizes your attention, that makes you think watching telly can be as good a thing to do as reading a book, or going to the theatre - and better than seeing most films. Last night's new Stephen Poliakoff play, Capturing Mary, was one of those things.
I have a history with Poliakoff, having loved his work ever since Caught on a Train almost twenty years ago. But it's since Shooting the Past in 1999 that he's really developed a distinctive, slow yet seductive, compelling dramatic style. Some, like Andrew Billen in the Times , dislike it. They find it self-conscious, snobbish even, and obsessed with the past. Others, like Gareth McLean and Josh Spero in the Guardian, think it boring, or samey, though I have to wonder about those people's attention span. And what they'd say about Pinter, or Beckett. I agree Poliakoff's work is variable. But at his best, and I think Capturing Mary along with the recent Friends and Crocodiles is his best work, he's the outstanding dramatist working in British television today. People used to say that about Dennis Potter, which I think just goes to show how bleak things were in those days, and how much better off we are now.
Mary is a talented, hugely sand effortlessly successful newspaper critic in the 1950s, a bright young thing living an A-list life and attending all the important parties - which, in those days, meant parties held by powerful people. Establishment people. At one particular at one particular London house (the same house that featured recently in the much weaker companion piece, Joe's Palace), Mary meets the mysterious, sinister and strangely powerful Greville White. Mysterious, because we're not quite sure who is he is or what he does to explain his constant social presence. Powerful, because he seems to find and use social secrets for his own purposes. And sinister, partly because played by the I thought impressive David Walliams. I simply can't agree with those who've slagged off this performance. I came to this expecting to be disappointed by this cross-over by a n over-hyped star, but found this both a convincing and genuinely frightening portrayal of a manipulative monster. He apparently selects Mary as worthy of his attention; worthy, possibly, to be added to his apparent collection of young women. He lures her into the wine cellar, where he inflicts on her squalid, nasty secrets of sexual perversion he has learned from the great and prominent - of thrashings and girls kept as slaves.
Mary's fame and career end abruptly - because she rejects Greville's offer of "protection"? Truth or paranoia, this is what Mary knows as she drinks her way into decline and through the sixties, never able to recapture the innocence of youth or her early success. Not enslaved by White, perhaps; but captured. Not perhaps destroyed, but damaged. Haunted by him, and what might have been.
That's one of the reasons this play rises well above the level of a sexy shocker. The supremely watchable Ruth Wilson (as fab in Mary Quant as in a ballgown) and Maggie Smith are completely believable as the same woman, and Mary's tragedy, on one level merely that of promise unfulfilled, becomes symbolic of the place of women, of youth and of what we used to call working class people in post-war England. Greville White lives in an old England, fifties England, where Mary should have known her place, and because she didn't, lost her prize. He's out of place, in an old-fashioned suit by the time the Beatles arrive - but by then it's too late for Mary. This is a gothic horror, and an erotic horror at that: which reminds me that I think Poliakoff's most compelling work is his most plainly erotic, at least in a cerebral way - the relationship between Paul and Lizzie in the brilliant, brilliant Friends and Crocodiles was another intensely, purely mentally sexual one. So, erotic horror, yes, well served by the as usual sumptuous visuals and (a key ingredient of Poliakoff's recent plays that's undermentioned) Adrian Johnston's lush score) and the performances, without which this might have been the camp nonsense Josh Spero thought it was. But it's not only a horror tale. It's also a meditation on the women's changing life chances since the war, on the restrictions they faced, and may face again as perhaps we are leaving behind a golden age of social mobility and retreat to the restored suffocating rule of celebrity and "who you know".
If one test of the value of television drama is its re-watchability, then this passes the test easily for me. I may even splash out on the DVD.
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