CAVE GIRL (Place Prints/New Perspectives)*****

 

By Sophie

Link: https://www.newperspectives.co.uk/?idno=1168&s=82

Available until: Unknown

Content warning: This episode contains some use of strong language.

This Place Print is in two parts. Part 1 is called Cave Girl and Part 2 is From the Stone Age. The stories feature the same characters, but they are separate. Part 2 will be reviewed tomorrow.

The fourth episode in the Place Prints is about a group of four students. They’re supposed to be filming for their media studies course and one of them, Kerry, thinks a castle will be the perfect location.

Her enthusiasm is not matched by her friends’. Gary and Dean seem more interested in messing around, teasing Kerry for her interest in the castle. Sharon feels the ground is wholly unsuitable for her shoes. But the four of them continue… and Kerry is overtaken by a strange sensation.

This Place Prints episode has a very different feel from the previous three. In those, the narrator was the ghostly presence which is a feature of all these stories. Whether it’s a person who must have died long ago, a church or a ditch, these voices were not part of our world.

Cave Girl, however, is narrated by Kerry, with occasional interjections from other actors, playing her friends and other characters. Although it is initially less creepy, Kerry does seem very much part of the modern world. The enforced school trips are an event which most of us remember with varying degrees of dissatisfaction and the four teenagers could easily be us and our classmates.

When the peculiar sensations begin to creep over Kerry, it feels almost as though it’s happening to us, or at least that it could happen to us. It’s clearly happening in our world; in a situation we have been in or could be in. As the terrifying truth is slowly revealed, we feel as trapped as Kerry, in a world which once seemed familiar and is now simply not.

Rachel Summers plays the role of Kerry and speaks the vast majority of the words in this play. She describes the scenes around them, along with Kerry’s thoughts and feelings and the words she says aloud. It’s an incredibly challenging and no doubt extremely exciting role to perform and Rachel is exemplary. She projects Kerry’s character so well: at first, Kerry is cheerful, fun and down to earth, intelligent and focused but also warm and friendly. Rachel engages us instantly.

As the play progresses, Rachel is forced to take on more challenges, some emotional and some vocal, as Kerry’s problems increase, and overwhelm her. It’s an incredibly impressive performance which highlights the excellence of David Rudkin’s writing, as well as Rachel’s talent. David has written some outstanding ‘voices’ in this series, but his creation of a teenage girl with (at first, anyway) nothing unusual about her at all who nevertheless holds our attention as easily as a ghost, church or ditch, is just as big an achievement.

Rachel’s friends are played by Grace Cordell, Harpal Hayer and Ben Welch, though I would not like to hazard a guess about which of the boys plays Gary and who plays Dean. They have little to say but are brilliantly-characterised and director Jack McNamara gets full value out of them as characters who really add something to the story. Grace plays Sharon as a nice enough but bored and dull-witted teenager (albeit with lovely shoes), injecting humour into her lines as she makes Sharon into both a stereotype and the exact embodiment (or whatever the vocal equivalent of that word might be) of so many teenaged girls. Gary is one of those boys who lead the general idiocy; Dean the more cautious one who follows along. They’re fun and easy to imagine and while it would have been lovely to hear more of all of them, this is clearly Kerry’s story.

Neale Birch, producer of New Perspectives, is uncredited on the main site but also makes an important contribution as an actor.

It is perhaps a surprising choice by David Rudkin that Kerry’s friends are included at all as they are excluded from Kerry’s disturbing experience, but they fulfil the important dramatic role of grounding the story in our reality and reminding us that it is our world. They are also great characters and give a scary story an element of humour which, far from being inappropriate for the style, gives Cave Girl yet another layer of enjoyment.