Adapted by Hefin Robinson from a novel by Tony Burgess

Directed by Dan Philips

Starring Lloyd Hutchinson, Victoria John, Mali O’Donnell, Ioan Hefin and Corwyn Jones

Wales Millennium Centre, 31 October 2024; on till November 16, 2024.

Grant Mazzy (Lloyd Hutchinson) is the last gunslinger, a self-styled truth telling shockjock whose unrelenting determination to be the loudest voice in the room has got him exiled to Beacon Radio in Wales. Grant is still Grant, but now he’s producer Rhiannon Briar (Victoria John)’s problem. Along with endlessly competent production assistant Megan Davies (Mali O’Donnell), the two settle in for another morning of snarling at each other and occasional traffic news from ‘eye in the sky’ reporter Ken Loney (Corwyn Jones). Grant wants a big story, and this morning, he’s going to get the biggest one of his life…

The movie version of Pontypool is an all-time favourite and now, so is this. Hefin Robinson’s script and Dan Philips’ direction drop the story into Wales in a manner that honours the original but makes it feel like a story that was born here. Philips has peppered the production with Welsh bands, and the songs all speak to the moment they arrive in the play. Welsh as a language becomes both a barrier and a refuge, as the linguistic plague at the heart of the story sweeps through English. Grant’s refusal to learn it, Rhi’s complex relationship with it and Meg’s open-armed embracing of it, her culture and the people all around her all steer the story in subtle, surprising ways. They also gift it some of its best scares and darkest jokes. My favourite is probably the team translating a government broadcast live on air whose final line is ‘Do Not Translate This Message.’

Philips’ cast deal head on with the linguistic complexities and visceral horrors of the play. Lloyd Hutchinson plays Grant as an escaped Clarksonian demagogue, holding forth on everything short of bloody revolution and then claiming it doesn’t matter because he didn’t mean it. He’s an idiot man child and like they so often are, intensely likable right before he’s monstrous. The second half addresses this head on and as society collapses, Grant Mazzy’s decision to save the day no matter the cost is one that’s heroic and monstrous by turns, just like him.

The rest of the cast are just as good, and struggle both with the apocalypse and tying Grant down before his ego carries him off into the vortex of apocalyptic opportunity forming in the town. Victoria John’s Rhiannon Briar is the producer everyone wants to have but the Grants of the world never listen to. Professional, compassionate, dogged and absolutely convinced she’s useless, her journey across the story is one of the most compelling and John is superb throughout. There’s a moment of horrific violence she sells utterly in the second half, using nothing but stunned silence and the arc of a torchlight on an otherwise dark stage. Some of her most poignant moments come after that as we see how convinced she is she’s the problem. Her relationship with Meg Davies, played with cheerful, courageous Doctor Who-like charm by Mali O’Donnell is especially affecting. The production assistant for the studio, Meg is the only person who speaks both Rhi and Grant’s languages. She deserves better than she gets, but that’s the tragedy of the story: everyone does. Philips and Robinson do a superb job of showing the cost to the small town, and the ‘Mourning in the Morning’ section is both bleakly humorous and terrifying as Grant reads off the list of people who’ve died so far that day.

That human cost is also embodied in the other two cast members. Ioan Hafin plays the town doctor, Harry Phillips, as a man who, in a kinder world, would be the B-movie scientist everyone listens to. Here he’s not as lucky, as shell-shocked and gore soaked as the rest of them but delivering a chilling combination of stunned humour and concise scientific deduction. Ken Loney, played by Corwyn Jones in voiceover is even less lucky and straddles the horror/absurdity barrier that the show is set along. The ‘traffic copter’ reporter, in reality in a van stealing traffic reports from the BBC, Ken is a rock star in a one star town and the imagined distance he has evaporates every time he calls in.

Five people, all of them trying to be the hero of their own story, all of them talking at cross purposes as the world ends, or perhaps, changes around them. Phillips and Robinson haven’t just brilliantly adapted a complex story, they’ve told an inherently Welsh story about hope, communication and what happens when we brush up against the unknown. The result is a triumph and one that’s only on until November 16th.

Verdict: If you love horror, and you’re in the UK, then you absolutely owe it to yourself to see this if you can. It’s stunningly good. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

https://www.wmc.org.uk/en/whats-on/2024/pontypool?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiA57G5BhDUARIsACgCYnxUk2W9CBQ7UoqiO2ZPEhCON-a5zyEgpBD3Zbq1qs_4MdLkklMgQO0aApXaEALw_wcB