“You’ve been here before?”

Elizabeth Robertson examines the work of the notable British writer-director Stephen Poliakoff in “‘You’ve been here before?’: Space and Memory in Stephen Poliakoff’s Dramas.” Poliakoff’s work has centred upon an examination of memory, history, and historical consciousness, and questions of space and place play important roles in the ways in which Poliakoff dramatizes his memory-narratives on stage and screen, occupying his dramas as physical and imaginative sites where past and present collide, and where memory can be recovered, reconstructed, and confronted. Through close reading of visual and written texts, focusing especially on scenes from the television dramas Perfect Strangers (2001) and Capturing Mary (2007), as well as the stage dramas Blinded by the Sun (1996) and My City (2011), Robertson examines how Poliakoff explores individual microhistories through the entrenchment of characters’ memories in place and space, thus creating private sites of memory.