PODCAST PLAY REVIEW: Placeprints Play#10 - Poison Cross

The final play in David Rudkin's series of 10 Placeprints finished with a tale of battle and murder in what is now Warwickshire; the crossroads of two of our oldest roads, both built by the Romans, Foss Way and Watling Street.

However before we get there and hear first hand accounts of one of the bloodiest and most devastating battles ever to be fought on Brtish soil, we are in the present day and in the cab of a long distance lorry haul, coming over from Romania in the Channel tunnel. We hear as the lorry, and the lorry's satnav - both anthropomorphised and protagonists in this story - tell of how Roman, the lorry's driver, loses his direction, becomes reliant on a deliberately misguiding satnav, and rather than arriving at the usual and prearranged drop-zone for his cargo, finds himself in deepest darkest Warwickshire. He has already had premonitions of this, even coming through the tunnel, he was subjected to hallucinations of dead bodies and becoming increasingly irritated by technical 'temporary malfunctions' from his trusted lorry and satnav.

The verbal exploration of the battle field and the images conjured up are the stuff of nightmares, and yet, still seem somehow real; and the whole serves as a record, albeit a rather theatricalised one, of the bloody slaughter than history seems to have forgotten. A mental re-enactment of an important event in our country's history.

The play ends almost too improbably. It turns out that the lorry driver Roman becomes a famous doctor, Roman Liginski, known for his para-sensory powers.

Again, this play suffers the same fate as all the other nine, in that Rudkin chooses highly descriptive and sometimes far too advanced language, and this gets in the way of the story. Here though, more so than in any other of these plays, I can clearly hear David Rudkin's own voice reading the part of the lorry. Rudkin is highly educated and a great wordsmith, artriculate and knowledgeable, with a large vocabulary at his disposal. Most people, especially those he writes about and for in these ten Placeprints plays don't have his advantage, and so their words and speech seems false and too grandiose.

This final podcast play was performed with sincerity and skill by Hedydd Dylan, Tyrone Huggins, Maria Louis, and Richard Lynch; and was, as with all, directed by Jack McNamara for New Perspectives Theatre.

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 16/7/20