Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Kelly Marie Tran, Elyse Dinh, George Q Nyugen, Colin Morgan, Ben Daniels, Ian McQuown, Doyla Gavanski, Valarie Vennix, Tessa Auberjonis, Pej Vahdat, Lauren Shippen, Carl Prekopp, Richard Tanner, Kelsey Venter, Sean T. Krishnan, Adam O’Byrne, Julie Adamo, Nathan Osgood, Laurel Lefkow, Gabby Brooks, Kathleen Early, Richard Doyle, Adrian Latourelle, Kristian Bruun, Patti LuPone, Steve Basaula, Mark Henry Phillips, Philip Desmeules, Becci Gemmell, Eben Figueiredo, Fode Simbo, Nicole Stedwell, Nick Massoub, Ray McAnally, Rob Benedict, Mary Gordon Murray, Richard Doyle, Heather Craney, Anjili Mohindra, Briggon Snow, Alex Brown Marshall, Raad Rawi, Marie France Arcilla, Clare Corbett, Jennifer Armour, Barbara Barnes, Eric Meyers, Chrstopher Ragland, Cyril Nri, Danielle Lewis, Akie Kotabe, Carlyss Peer, Gianna Kiehl, Kerry Shale.
We live in a world where a simple accident can lead to questions which can lead to evasive answers. The replies, due to the unknown variables, are often vague, can be misconstrued as mysterious, puzzling, and vague to the point where the questioner senses that there is more to the scenario than meets the eye.
Conspiracy theories are born from the lack of the minute detail, the belief that the public can be spared a grizzly fact, that we are children governed by emotions that we cannot understand; it is these omissions in the day to day running of life that sees each one of us at one time or another feel as though what is being presented to us as explanation is nothing more than a lie, a plot to see us be compliant to the needs of the fraud and imposter of truth taking place.
Yet sometimes the truth is there is a conspiracy, of silence, of design, and when that information is surrounded by a sudden, unexplained, and devastating loss of human life, it can find ways to survive the tight lips of government and business alike.
The disappearance of Flight 702 from London to New York is a moment where sublimely conceived audio drama merges with the need to believe anything other than what others want you to believe; even if you are the only one on the planet who does not accept the ‘established’ truth.
In Passenger List, created by John Scott Dryden, the listener is taken through the emotional turmoil and suspicions of student Kaitlin Le as she learns that her brother is one of many who has been pronounced missing, later dead, as the flight he was travelling on becomes another fatal statistic of aircraft loss over the Atlantic Ocean.
Passenger List asks a set of pertinent questions, just how far would you be prepared to go, how many lives would you put in danger, how many distraught notions of fanciful theory would you suffer in the vain hope that someone you love is still alive.
The twelve-part series creates the point of obsession and the search for truth, and how they can often become entangled, how one person’s refusal to see the accident as what the official line dictates, can soon drag others to whom the lifting of the veil of secrecy is akin to that of treachery by administration. Such a steadfast refusal to bow to the inevitable is commendable, it is a right to refuse compliance to authority, even at the cost of peace in the mind, we must trust our guts that regimes all over the world do not care for the public, they only want power and control, even in every lie possible.
With a cast given every confidence by the writing team, with a large sense of scale, especially for radio, Passenger List is a reveal of dangerous precedents taking place in our lifetime. Secrets and lies comfort the majority, they just want to live their life knowing they will see the next day, it is only when the sky falls in on them, as they too become a number, that we see just how far they will go to avoid being on the passenger list to nowhere.
A tremendous play, a damning scenario which is always possible, this is not a conspiracy, it is the machination of truth.
Ian D. Hall