Amid a glut of plays based on films, this is a canny proposition on paper. Writer Hefin Robinson has relocated a 2008 horror film from Pontypool, Ontario, to the Welsh town that the Canadian one was named after. He updates Tony Burgess’s original story, of a virus spread through words, so that it unfolds against the heightened anxiety of the Covid era. The film’s claustrophobic effect was aided by its use of a single location; the play keeps those confines and is staged by Dan Phillips in a studio space. But its main flaw is taking the same scattershot approach as the screen version, resulting in a grab bag of concerns about dangerous rhetoric, media responsibility, misinformation and othering in an age of rage.
Grant Mazzy (Lloyd Hutchinson) is a boorish shock jock who, after a scandal-hit career in England, is hosting a morning radio show in south Wales. His edgelord posturing is reined in by his producer (Victoria John) – “We are not GB News!” she shrieks – but humoured by their technician (Mali O’Donnell). Hutchinson’s Mazzy arrives in full gammon mode: joking about “snowflakes”, mocking trigger warnings and ridiculing pronoun badges as he holds court in the recording booth on designer Cory Shipp’s set. But in a small town where a missing cat provides a news item, Mazzy soon has more pressing concerns, as reports come in of babbling zombie-like hordes who have become infected by words in the English language.
