Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Robert Glenister, Sean Pertwee, Suzanne Packer, Stephen Walters, Grainne Keegan, Martin McDonagh, James Keating, Gary Murray, Kim Daly, Denise McCormack, Anthony Brophy, Sophie Mensah, Philip Shaun McGuinness, Rachel Wren, Esther Ayo James, Steve Hartland, Fiona Mulvaney, Charlie Griffiths, Michael Atonio Keane.
Those who find daylight their friend and the dark shadows, punctured by the glow of streetlight lamps and the splashing neon decorated by the noise of partygoers as they weave their way from glass to glass, will surely never understand the sense of loneliness that scratches at the mind of the night workers, the cab drivers, the nurses, the all night café owners who soak up the remains of the day; for these people become engrossed in the late night talk in, the radio station host who offers comfort and familiarity in a world dominated by the numbness of dysmorphic time.
The late-night radio host becomes a friend, someone easy to talk to, the one we might share a trouble with in time of anguish, the one we wish to tell a joke to knowing it will be well-received; and in return we feel that the call is more than one with a disembodied voice in the dark, they become the light, they radiate calmness, they employ an almost sympathetic, near psychiatrist level of intelligence as they respond with The Night Caller as a confident, an ally.
Written by Nick Saltrese and set against Liverpool’s nightlife, Tony, a former respected science teacher turned cab driver, is visibly falling apart, broken by a nightmare of the collapse of responsibility and the sheer amount of guilt he bears upon his shoulders and the visions he repeatedly sees despite doing all he feels he can to leave the past behind.
It is in this spiral of self-recrimination that the orbits of Tony and Lawrence start to collide, a movement of public certainty as Tony sees a possible way to talk to someone as a friend, a comrade in the night hours.
The sense of threat is never far from the surface who walk the night hours, and after an altercation with a known trouble-maker, Tony’s already spiralling mental health begins to take a faster, more destructive road, and one that he will eventually pull Lawrence into…a man to whom the truth of his life is as clear as his insistence of calling people “Mate”, or the unravelling of his own persona as his well-built lie of sympathy is placed in jeopardy.
It is to the sheer genius of both Robert Glenister as Tony and Sean Pertwee as Lawrence that the drama is given its rightful frightening, near relentless build up, but also the added tension installed by Philip Shaun McGuinness in a role that speaks volumes in undeclared violence and threatening vehemence of the damage to come; it is a role that the Liverpool actor has excelled at portraying and quite rightly could fill the screen with his commanding presence.
In a situation where we find compassion for those driven past their limit by circumstances beyond their control, the part of Tony the taxi driver is one to inhabit the ages, poignantly shown and written in an age where darkness is overwhelming, the resonance of the piece is irresistible, vastly crushing, and delicately understood; The Night Caller is to be understood absolutely. Ian D. Hall