Running in Cardiff at the Millennium Centre until November 16th, Pontypool is an adaptation of the cult novel by Tony Burgess. The story follows shock jock Grant Mazzy, exiled to Beacon Radio in rural Canada and desperate to get his life back. Grant’s a big fish in a tiny pond, and he’s on air when reports come in of a strange riot. As the night continues, Grant and his station crew find themselves at the centre of the most important story in history. A viral outbreak has hit Pontypool, one that infects language. How can the Beacon Radio staff stop it when the only tool they have is how it spreads?
Hefin Robinson’s script transposes the action to Pontypool in Wales, and that’s just the first of a string of clever choices the show makes. Director Dan Phillips has peppered Cardiff with MISSING CAT posters from the opening news story Grant reads on air. The wi-fi network has been renamed BEACON RADIO. The songs played during Grant’s show are all Welsh bands, and all of them subtly tie into the action. In a play where communication is both a tool and a weapon. Philips uses it to paint a canvas that extends far off the stage and both demands and rewards your attention.
The small cast all impress. Carwyn Jones, as the station’s enigmatic traffic reporter Ken Loney, puts a face, or rather voice, on the horror, while Ioan Hafin’s Doctor Harry Phillips is a shellshocked combination of hard-bitten B-movie action scientist and bleakly humorous Shakespearean fool. The show is crammed with increasingly bleak laughs, many of which come from these two men. I also loved the deeply Welsh station idents, including ‘Mourning in the Morning’, the obituary slot that is so perpetual that it has its own jingle.
But the core of the show is the studio crew. Mali O’Donnell’s Megan is the studio production assistant and a cheerful, hyper-competent ray of sunshine in the bleak wintry world of the play. Lloyd Hutchinson’s Grant Mazzy is a bundle of rage, neuroses and hyper-eloquence held together by a Clarksonian leather jacket and a too-sharp ear for a good turn of phrase. The decision to cast Grant as Irish, exiled from London to Wales, only adds to the show’s heady cocktail of communication as threat and isolation as fact. But Victoria John’s Rhiannon Briar, the producer, is who haunts you. John is superb as a relentlessly competent woman whose baggy jumper holds as many secrets as Grant’s leather jacket. She starts as Grant’s nemesis, but as the situation collapses, their relationship evolves from antagonism to co-conspirators to terrified survivors. Their scrappy, terrified duel with one of the infected is carried out on a blacked-out stage, the arcs of a torch-turned cudgel the only thing illuminating the horror. The radio booth itself shifts from pulpit to prison to refuge as they first hide in it and then lock the infected hunting them in it. The whole time, the snow falls. The whole time, the sound of gunfire and screams gets closer and closer until it’s in the room with them. And us.
It’s appropriate that a show about language evolving does so many things so well. It’s a workplace comedy, a zombie story, a War of the Worlds homage and an unblinking dissection of shock jock mentality. It’s a deeply Welsh story, shot through with stoical pragmatism and wickedly dark humour. It’s a story about redemption and what we do to get it. Most of all, it’s very, very good, and if you’re in the UK and can get to Cardiff, you owe it to yourself to see it.
Pontypool is currently playing at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff. Find out more here.
