Emergency

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Emergency by poet Jacob Polley set in Carlisle in 2005 with Joe Dixon as The Storm

Jacob Polley explores the experience of a love-struck couple in Carlisle during the catastrophic flood event of 2005 in a play swirling with voices from the near and distant past.

Emergency - written by poet Jacob Polley. Part of Contains Strong Language, the BBC's  Poetry and Spoken word festival.

I’m not in normal weather. This isn’t a normal rain event… What’s it like to be caught up in an emergency?

In a play swirling with voices – voices called up from the near past and from ancient history, voices breaking in, voices capsizing one another – Jacob Polley explores the experience of a love-struck couple in Carlisle during the catastrophic Cumbrian flood event of 2005. Described at the time as a ‘once in 100-year event’, Cumbria was flooded again in 2015 and again in 2020, and in the play becomes a place representative of the consequences of the wider climate emergency. 

It’s enough to make you giddy, isn’t it? Pitching between a mortal perspective and the perspective of, say, twenty generations; between a human scale of living rooms, streets and houses, and an elemental scale of airmasses drawn in thousand-mile swirls across the earth…

Through a 1200-year-old Old English riddle, which draws on texts from the even more ancient classical world, Polley gives voice to Storm itself, dramatizing the shock, awe and conflicting witnessings that have been fundamental to the human experience of catastrophe. ‘Emergency’ is a giddy, poetic and symphonic exploration of a specific event and place, and of the elemental powers of the natural world, conjured in a unique soundscape composed by the Dutch musicians, Strijbos and van Rijswijk.

STORM ................................Joe Dixon
HIM........................................James Cooney
HER .......................................Jeanette Percival
PLINY/LANDLORD............Simeon Truby 
REPORT/Resident .............Emily Pithon

With specially composed music by world renowned sound artists Strijbos & Van Rijswijk.

Directed by Susan Roberts A BBC Audio Drama North Production

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