Drama reveals poisoning of Russia-UK relations
Tevya Turok Shapiro speaks to MyAnna Buring about her role in The Salisbury Poisoning, which led to the death of Dawn Sturgess in 2018, and how the UK’s weak response to her death may have emboldened Vladimir Putin
Each episode of The Salisbury Poisoning begins with the text: “In 2018 the people of Salisbury were faced with an unprecedented crisis. A chemical weapons attack on a British City. Based on first-hand accounts and extensive interviews, this is their story.”
The phrasing of this prelude says a lot about how writers Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn chose to approach the events that took place. Rather than investigating the mystery and political significance of the attempted assassination, they get inside the experience of the people of Salisbury itself.
MyAnna Buring feels the decision to prioritise the human element of the crisis is an important asset of the series: “Whatever happens in politics, we’re often focused on these larger ideas or larger decisions. But painfully, acutely prominent in our lives now is the awareness of how these decisions affect everyday human beings who, for all intents and purposes, aren’t even aware of these geopolitical events that ultimately have detrimental effects on their lives.”
Three characters take centre stage in the series. The first is Detective Sergeant Nick Baily (played by Rafe Spall), a first responder at the scene of Sergei and Yulia Skripal’s collapse on a park bench in the city centre. Initially, Baily did not suspect that the Skripals had been poisoned. By the time he discovered that Sergei was a freed Russian spy from high up in MI6, he had already been exposed to the poison at the scene.
The person with the most screen time is Tracy Daszkiewicz (Anne-Marie Duff), who had recently taken up the post as director of public health for Wiltshire. She is the underdog we root for, thrown into the deep end with thousands of lives in her hands.
The series comes to her defence, situating the viewer on the stage side of her PR battle with the public, who blame her for the inconveniences they face even though she is the one acting to protect their safety.
And then, of course, there’s Dawn Sturgess (Buring), the only direct casualty of the crisis. It’s notable that Sturgess’s story doesn’t link to the other narratives for more than half the series. She is just a woman with her own problems – a single mother trying to quit booze, pay the rent and reconnect with her family. This emphasises the injustice and randomness of her martyrdom as a result of confounding bad luck.
Sturgess got a very bad rap in the press. Her proximity to addiction was fixated on, to the point of cruelty, with speculations such as her and her partner having been exposed to the poison via a contaminated needle or discarded cigarette. Buring told us that this
portrayal is something that the series tries to address and correct.
“For her family in particular, it was heart-wrenching to … lose this valued member of their family, and then to have her dismissed afterwards with what essentially were lies. We need to take responsibility for the stories that we tell. Sensationalism is great – it might lead to more clicks – but at the end of the day, it’s really damaging.
“The writers really tried to create some balance in how her story was portrayed.”
The biased representation of people and events is a running theme in the series. The episodes open with a montage of real news reports, reminding the audience that this really happened.
Given the context of what has happened since, it is interesting to reflect on how the national response may have inadvertently paved the way to the invasion of Ukraine by showing Vladimir Putin what he could get away with.
Buring notes that some could deem the UK’s response weak as it was not the first time an assassination attempt had taken place on British soil.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, fled Russia after speaking out about corruption within the intelligence agencies. He became a British citizen and, in 2006, was poisoned with polonium.
“He managed to live for long enough to help police here solve his own murder, and his wife, Marina, went through a 10-year battle for a public inquiry to be held into her husband’s death.
The judge who presided over the inquiry, having gone through all the evidence … was very clear in pointing the finger and the responsibility directly back at Putin and his regime,” Buring says.
“At the time, Theresa May was our home secretary and she even commented, I’m paraphrasing here, that ‘relationships with Russia were relatively good at the time and they didn’t want to rock the boat’, which is why I think Marina had to push so hard for that public inquiry. So now 2018, another assassination attempt and this time they weren’t successful on Sergei Skripal – again, a former KGB dissident who had found asylum in the UK. At this time, Theresa May [was] our prime minister and Boris Johnson [was] our foreign secretary.
“They acknowledged in 2018 that it was very clear that it was Russian military intelligence agents who had come to the country and committed the attack.”
In both cases, the attacks not only put their targets at risk but also “thousands, potentially tens of thousands of people, innocent people”, she says. “In the case of Salisbury, of course, Dawn died because of their reckless behaviour, handling a chemical nerve agent that is lethal and has such a long half-life.
“Had it come into the water system, we can’t even imagine the devastation that it would have brought. It’s a miracle that so few people were affected, but it doesn’t take away from the horror of how that callousness could have caused many more deaths. There’s a recklessness to the life of civilians that is prominent in both of those stories. Now we are seeing it on a larger scale with the invasion of Ukraine by the same government,” says Buring.
“There was definitely a sense at the time that not enough was done. We now know there are many Russian donors to the Tory party here in the UK. Should that ever have been allowed to happen?
“The sanctions that they’re putting in place now position them clearly in terms of where they stand, but there are many who are … saying it’s too little too late. And, perhaps, doing so little may have emboldened Putin and made him feel there were few consequences.”
The Salisbury Poisoning is available in South Africa on Britbox.