Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Deborah Findlay, Adam Gillen, Ruth Everett, Asif Khan, Gerard McDermott, Rosie Mellett, Hasan Dixon.
When we think of strange happenings at train stations our minds could be drawn to the terrific tale by Charles Dickens, The Signal-Man, and the second adventure in the spooky Sapphire and Steel series, for our lives in the last two hundred years have been altered by the arrival of the ability to travel across country in a matter of hours rather than the days and weeks it would have taken to journey for example from London to Inverness even at the end of the 18th Century; but also time has a way of causing ripples, and where better than a place where mechanism and modern ingenuity meets the stagnation of patiently waiting for life to continue.
Whether surrounded by hundreds of people as they mingle on a busy platform or enjoying the silence of an empty waiting room, time can become an inconvenience, a problem of its own manufacture, and if a train is late, delayed, or even cancelled, it can be a disruption of time itself.
It is to this lost time that Sebastian Baczkiewcz’s latest drama, We Apologise For Any Inconvenience, lifts the spirits of audio drama lover to the point where being stationary is actually a pleasure and the intrigue of stagnancy is one which captivates the mind.
Waiting on a train can feel as though it is the epitome of Groundhog Day, different day perhaps, but the same sense of helplessness as the air is occasionally punctured by the monotone apology of the bored and unseen as they distil any sense of looming anarchy by reminding passengers that they are ultimately in the hands of fate, that the Groundhog Day feel can always continue, and they would never realise.
To break the monotony, to see beyond the limbo, we must accept that one moment which will seem impossible. The train might be delayed, but that doesn’t mean that somewhere on the station there isn’t a person searching for an answer, looking for a reason for the stoppage and willing to alter just one small aspect that might just restart time for all concerned.
For Mason the inconvenience is such that he is the only one who remembers the delay, the constant pause that has hit the northern English station and all the interference in the passengers’ lives, and as he astounds them by knowing things that they were sure they had not informed him of, so he begins to see the chance to move time on once more, if only he can get one of the people to be persuaded to part with something valuable.
We Apologise For Any Inconvenience is an amusing, but also charmingly simple tale that does not suffer from pretension or from ill will, it requires acceptance of the ordinary, and an understanding that life is far from diverting when the world seems to stop and repeat itself. Sebastian Baczkiewcz brings an intelligent tale to life with a pleasure often reserved for that which seeks to send a shiver down the spine.
Ian D. Hall