In dreams begin responsibilities

This is a great review of 'Gideon's Daughter' by Hermione Eyre, from The Independent on Sunday (05/3/06); I couldn't find it online, so I copied it from the paper.

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Watching Gideon's Daughter, the latest TV play by Stephen Poliakoff, was like going through REM. At the end of it I felt obscurely refreshed and full of renewed understanding. Only, as after a dream, it took some effort to remember why. I felt as if I had gone under with its first long seamless tracking shot, which glided over several bunches of flowers lying end-to-end on the pavement, panning up slowly to show dozens, hundreds, thousands of bouquets covering the ground - a field of flowers laid, of course, for Princess Diana. With this one shot, Poliakoff regressed his audience to 1997, to its strange sentimentality, it new touchy-feely government.

Flowers then peeked out of almost every shot of the film, which had as its central character Gideon Warner (played by Bill Nighty at his best and most restrained), a New Labour PR svengali going through a breakdown. His office is stuffed with designer tulips in vases full of glass pebbles. His daughter's dress has a print of blown poppies. He makes cherry blossoms fall out of the sky over London as part of an aerial PR stunt. The flowers represent the superficiality of his world of spin, cut flowers being the ultimate symbol of style without substance. Good job, then, that Gideon meets the down-to-earth Stella (a magnificent Miranda Richardson) who takes him to stand in a field of thistles outside an industrial estate.

Thus the PR supremo is redeemed, and quits his job running the Millennium Dome. "What a hole he left behind him" the chorus-figure Sneath (Robert Lindsay) comments dryly.
The flower motif also relates to the play's other preoccupation: a parent's loss of a child. The blossoms must fall, whether to death (Stella's little boy died in a cycling accident) or to university (Gideon's Sphinx-like daughter, played beautifully by Emily Blunt, wants to go on a gap year). There's a rather crass equation of the two in Robert Lindsay's line, "When they go to university, it's like a death, a little death", but then these kinds of condensations, these moral equivalencies, do occur in dreams.
And with its richness in content, its hallucinatory colours (Stella wears pea-green gloves) and hypnotic, tranquil pace, Gideon's Daughter was a dream. A very good one. You would have been better off watching this than having a deep sleep, which sounds rude, but is in fact the most sincere compliment I can think of.