2016 Quarter 2 Review 8/13

009 Police Procedural – Old 

Oddly, the four-parter “Condition Purple” P Division only seemed to come together in the final bit, in a very unconventional reveal.  It felt rather dated in some senses—the theme music, the obsession with AIDs—and focused on prostitutes and the cops who specialised in them (not Vice exactly).  While one villain was a psychopathic killer, the other villains seemed to be Scotland’s upper middle class holier-than-thous and Roman Catholicism. It’s also not often you get to hear the voice of the victim after her death. Originally from 1990, it was written by Peter Turnbull and adapted by Stephen Mulrynde.  It starred Ralph Riah, Martin McHardy, Gerard Sleven, Frank Gallagher, Martin Cochrane, John Yule, Alex Macavoy, Anne-Louise Ross, Alexander Morton, and John Buick, and was directed by Hamish Wilson.  

Hearing Voices was a fantastic play from 2011.   Tim McInnerny surprised me again, this time playing a DS who is getting ready to retire and take up golf.  However, the attack on a plain-clothes PC in a bar (and his eventual death) trigger unsettling developments in Jim’s head, and he starts hearing voices.  To be precise, one voice (Danny Webb), which taunts and denigrates him to the point where he can’t do his job.  He is diagnosed as schizophrenic, takes medication, this helps but he becomes sluggish and still can’t work.  He goes off the pills and tries to cope, but in the end he confronts the PC’s killer in an abandoned factory where he is left for dead by the perpetrator.  Very well-written and performed, suspenseful, and quite harrowing, this play also starred Ian Bartholomew, Daniel Rabin, Ewan Bailey, Jane Slavin, Nyasha Hatendi, and Joanna Munroe, and was directed by Eoin O’Callaghan.