Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later, OUT NOW

CRY HAVOC! ASK QUESTIONS LATER

Created by DAVID K. BARNES
Episodes 10 and 12
written by TOM CROWLEY

Releasing weekly on all good podcast apps and streaming at the Rusty Quill website, it’s the new audio comedy from Wooden Overcoats creator David K. Barnes! Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later is a silly, gripping, funny serial drama that covers the ascent and gradual corruption of the triumvirate: Gaius Octavius Caesar, Mark Antony and, oh, I suppose there’s Lepidus too. After a series of gruesome civil wars that followed the death of Julius Caesar, these three very different men attempt to heal and rule a bloodied Rome and encounter a few difficulties along the way. There’s Gaius’s all-round wimpiness, Mark’s violent temper and excessive drinking, the fact that they’re too broke to pay their own armies and, perhaps worst of all, the powerful and cunning Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, who keeps hanging around, flaunting her own wealth and trying to get hold of what little they have left. Still, Rome is a great and civilised society, how much can really go wrong, just because three incompetent, ambitious and distrustful people take over? Quite a lot, as it happens.

It was an honour to be asked to join the profoundly talent-stuffed Cry Havoc writers’ room, run as it was by my fellow Wooden Overcoats alumnus David K. Barnes and filled as it was with numerous other intimidatingly skilled writers from the worlds of theatre, radio and podcasting. But it’s always an honour and a joy to be asked to do anything by David as his shows are always typified by wit and cleverness and his stewardship as a head writer is smart, delicate and guaranteed to restore hair vitality in just two weeks or your money back. Also steering the (pirate) ship was Amani Zardoe, ace director and actor making her first foray into the world of podcasts, who took to coordinating voice actors like a duck to water. David and Amani made a smashing team and the proof is in the pudding, which is a pudding made of digital data in the form of mp3 files released as a podcast.

My contributions to the series are episodes 10 and 12, part of the episode 9-to-12 bank that tells the tale of a thrilling pirate kidnap and resulting chaos. Episodes 9 and 11 were handled by new friend and brilliant scriptwriter Octavia Bray, known for her work on podcasts Life With LEO(h) and The AM Archives. Working in tandem with Octavia was immediately seamless as well as being very inspirational and dead good fun to boot. Never has the outline of a four-episode arc been beaten out so quickly and effortlessly as when David, Octavia and I plotted a deadly pirate raid. It was also a sentimental experience to get to write for some old friends from Overcoats again: Andy Secombe as Lepidus, Ellie Dickens as Atia and Beth Eyre as Fulvia, all able to take any script and make it at least twenty percent better just by standing near it.

But just as you thought I was going to simply write for a radio production, I shock and thrill you by revealing that I also acted as numerous characters in a background capacity throughout Cry Havoc, playing assorted senators, actors and fishermen. After playing a fairly straight-laced lead character in Wooden Overcoats, it was a treat to conjure multiple stranger, broader, more unreasonable and thoroughly more Roman people here. What’s more, as you’ll see in the image above and hear in the show itself, the core cast is made up of wildly talented and admirably polite actors, and it was an absolute pleasure to shout at them and offer general background verbal abuse in their direction.

It’s wonderful to witness David’s continuing progress as a writer. I first met him, very briefly, at a writers’ workshop at the National Student Drama Festival in 2011. My next exposure to his work was when I went to see my pal Felix Trench in a preview performance of David’s translation and adaptation of Marivaux’s play Games of Love and Chance, where it became immediately clear that David was brilliant. Since then, we’ve seen rather a lot of each other and so I think I can claim some authority when I say that David is still brilliant. Cry Havoc is a slightly different outing for him after Overcoats, with more of an element of political farce about it and with a series arc that goes to some much darker places. That said, it still has all the sparkling wit and Beth Eyre you came to expect from Piffling Vale, so well worth a listen for any Channel Islands enthusiast. Cry Havoc is The Thick Of It crossed with Up Pompeii and I strongly recommend you give it a try.