Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Toby Stephens, Keeley Hawes, Lily Sacofsky, Linus Roache, Gary Beadle, Toby Woolf, Lucy Cohu, Mark Bonnar, Claire Bloom, Suanne Braun, Timothy Spall, Rose Ayling-Ellis, Leo Staar, Greg Austin, Peter Firth, Molly Casey, Safiyya Ingar, Ronald Pickup, Matthew James Thomas, Jordan Coulson, Fode Simbo, Tony Maudsey, Adrian Edmondson, James Faulkner, Richard Cordery, Cai Brigden,

It takes a special kind of writer to be able to bring to focus the everyday item which we take for granted and then make it part of a story which employs all the finest elements of the dark forces that govern our lives and installs the direction in which a Government and its people are taking.

In many respects Summer of Rockets could only have been written by Stephen Poliakoff, a drama that depends on family history and the experiences that could be fashioned by the events surrounding them. If you write what you know, then Mr. Poliakoff is a person to whom interesting is not enough of an adjective to accurately describe, a keen observer of life to whom fate has offered the opportunity to be a compulsive teller of tales, stimulating, to be reckoned with. For in the mind of one who urges the observation to take on a greater significance, who sees the possibility to build upon the understated and otherwise insignificant to a place of unforgettable tension; then interesting is redundant, remarkable is a far greater word of endearment to profess.

It is perhaps to our own history that we seek inspiration, the untold stories of our closest relatives, and how when we look back at them, in amongst the bright colours of battles won and personal heroics presented, we actually recognise the space between as one of intrigue, that the shadows in which we are not privy to at all, are actually the moments that framed their life.

We all have secrets, some we have to keep away from our nearest and dearest, but as the threat of nuclear annihilation became a frightening prospect during the cold war, it perhaps became a time when all that was achieved was not for broadcast to even those we shared our heartbeats with. It is in that tension that Summer of Rockets gets under the skin, the brief symbolism of how the staff locator, otherwise known as the pager, became an intrinsic part of everyday life and how it becomes part of the narrative to which the semi-autobiographical story revolves around the Petrukhin and Shaw Families.

There is perhaps a damning revelation to which inventor Samuel Petrukhin, played magnificently by Toby Stephens, admits to, that he no longer aspires to be an English gentleman, in a hot bed of denial and actions by any state’s mechanism to protect itself against those wishing to overthrow it, if you knew all that the state was capable of, would you even wish to consider being part of that system, of wanting to be seen as an example of its values.

With excellent performances by Keeley Hawes, Mark Bonnar, Colin Firth, Timothy Spall and by relative newcomer Lily Sacofsky, who gives a stirring portrayal of youthful concern of the prospect of war as Hannah Petrukhin, the realisation that Summer of Rockets is an author’s way of exploring his own past is an exhilarating prospect to behold. Calmly measured and pointed, Stephen Poliakoff once more delivers a slice of national history interwoven with the everyman’s viewpoint keenly observed.

Ian D. Hall