David Rudkin's 4th play in his series of radio podcast plays, Placeprints, is in two parts. Both parts can be taken as seperate entities, but listened to together make more sense, as they involve the same characters, in the same area, doing the same thing. It's just that the two stories can exist separately in the same way perhaps that two episodes of a sitcom can exist separately but make more sense when shown one aftyer the other.
Once again the plays are directed by Jack Macnamara and have music and sound cleverly intertwining them by Adam McCready. For these placeprints we find ourselves in the Sussex Downs, around the cottage 'Brinkwells', lived in by the ageing composer Edward Elgar before his death.
Once again, this play is more or less a monologue, this time spoken by the protagonist of the piece, a teenage schoolgirl, Kerry, played here by Rachel Summers.
In the first part 'Cave Girl', we learn that Kerry and her school mateshave come out to these hills as part of a school project, and as they wander around looking for locations for the film they are to make for their media studies class, Kerry climbs ahead of her group and to the top of a muddy hill with a grand vista around her. There she has visions and apparitons appear before her of the area's prehistoric past. As the visions become stronger she finds herself speaking with one of the cave girls and even becoming a cave girl herself and becomes stuck in a timewarp, unable to allow her friends who are shouting her to bring her back into the present.
It's an exciting story, very visual and dramatic. It would make for a good film in actual fact. However, the one problem I have with both this and the second part of this particlular placeprint is that the language used is not that of a contemporary teenage girl. Written by David Rudkin I can easily imagine him speaking these lines, but the vocabulary, style of language, and indeed the level of insuight given to Kerry seems wrong and too adult for her
The second part of this placeprint is 'From The Stone Age' and once again we see Kerry and her friends (who in both plays are nothing more than a few far off peripheral voices and hardly need to be a part of the monologues at all other than to give the listener more depth and another voice to listen to). It is later on in the same day, in fact evening, and they are walking back to their car to drive home. Kerry is still having visions of cave men in animal skins and is still having difficulty in returning back to the real world. So, whilst the others in her group attend to the car's apparent flat battery and try to get the car started she finds another track and walks along it coming to a small cottage with an elderly couple living there and cello music being played. From the introduction we understand that this is a vision of Edward Elgar and his wife around the turn of the 20th century, and, as that vision fades she feels cold, afraid and empty. She is lost in time, she doesn't know where she is anymore, and finds herself walking hurriedly back to the car and the others. She's in a parallel universe now though as she sees the others driving down the lane as tragedy strikes.
For me, the play would benefit from ending here, however, it doesn't and we are taken now to one year later as Kerry, on her own, comes back and vsiits the scene of the tragedy. I am not at all sure what purpose this 8 minutes of the play has or what difference it makes, but she reminices about what happened and thinks, 'if only I had not been having those visions and had have been in the car with them...!'
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 1/7/20
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