Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Anne-Marie Duff, Rafe Spall, MyAnna Buring, Mark Addy, Annabel Scholey, Nigel Lindsay, Stella Gonet, Kiera Thompson, Duncan Pow, Darren Boyd, Stephanie Gil, William Houston, Emma Stansfield, Jonathon Slinger, Andrew Brooke, Johnny Harris, Wayne Swann, Faye McKeever, Melanie Gutteridge, Jill Winternitz, Michael Schaeffer, Ron Cook, Paul Popplewell, Clare Burt, Naomi Yang, Amber Aga.
In television drama days gone by serials such as The Salisbury Poisonings would have been given the same treatment as that which saw the nuclear torn British mainland of Threads, or the plague-pandemic ravaged world of Survivors make headlines for their vision of a society torn apart by humanity’s absolute belief in its destiny, and the shock of hubris when it all comes crumbling down.
It is in the times we live in, that drama takes its inspiration and depictions of the sense of the apocalyptic from the headlines that we would never have expected to see, the horror, the concern, the sheer and absolute terror that sees a foreign power cripple a city’s infrastructure, drive its citizens to a state of despair, disbelief and anger, through one act of terrorism, cultivated under the umbrella of political assassination.
Programmes such as Threads and Survivors at least could hide behind the respectable veneer of imagination, a warning to the future from the present it occupied, that the course of actions being undertaken by humanity would lead us all to annihilation. How though, can a drama prepare you for the actual event in which it portrays, the past incident which haunts our collective future; and which for the people of Salisbury, its picturesque gardens, its immense history, its Constable painted skyline, the poisoning of the innocent Dawn Sturgess, Charley Rowley and DS Nick Bailey, as well as the main players in the case, Sergei and Yulia Skripal, was not only a shock, but a reminder that the quiet Wiltshire city, which has seen its fair share of appalling incidences, is not immune to devils who seek to murder on foreign shores.
The argument will be that such a drama has come far too soon, that the wounds, the sore of that time, have not even begun to heal over; and in a way they would be right. However, The Salisbury Poisonings is resolute in its portrayal of the known events, it proceeds with delicate balance that asks for enlightenment as well as accuracy, and it honours the lives, the families of those who were touched by the sheer wickedness that was brought to Salisbury in 2018.
With excellent performances by Anne-Marie Duff as the determined public health officer Tracy Daszkiewicz, Rafe Spall as DS Nick Bailey, MyAnna Buring as Dawn Sturgess, Ron Cook as her father Stan, and Mark Addy as Ross Cassidy, The Salisbury Poisonings is not entertainment, it is the hammering of the search for truth and justice for a community that was terrorised, pushed to an extraordinary place never encountered in Britain at that time, before.
Ian D. Hall