Reviewed: The King of the Dead

Alex Fitch is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

On Radio 4 this morning, there was a discussion of a new immersive theatrical performance taking place in North Greenwich (i.e. near the Dome) in London. The presenter of the segment asked the creators of the performance to explain just what it was that was being staged (some kind of exploration of relationships and infidelity called ‘Heartbreak Hotel’) and how the audience interaction with the narrative might work.

Certainly the news article implied this kind of performance still seems like a novelty to many people and as someone who has been to a handful of examples of immersive / interactive theatre in London (mainly performed by Shunt) it seems like a relatively new art form to me, also. The fifth of Big Finish’s new Short Trips range sees the early Season 20 team – the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan – tackling a deadly alien presence that’s materialised within the set of an interactive theatrical experience in the 1980s; I welcome any Kasterborous readers who know of early immersive theatre events from 30 years ago to pass the info on, as I’d be fascinated to find out more, but in the context of The King of the Dead, it seems incongruous to have this kind of theatre production taking place that long ago.

That said, immersive theatre is an environment that offers all sorts of narrative possibilities in terms of how one might describe an encounter by visitors not knowing what was going on if they stumbled into a performance of this kind in media res. In this case, not long after the TARDIS arrives, Tegan recognises what is going on and explains the status quo to her fellow travellers, which somewhat diminishes the potential of the set-up. However, Nyssa still finds it challenging throughout the plot in knowing when someone she encounters is ‘in character’ and when not, which helps recapture the frisson of their environment.

The 1980s setting of this story is mainly so that another character with a grudge against the Doctor can be in the right place at the right time, and as ‘Earth Who’ is a place where there is a lake at Carbury and a giant robot can terrorise Victorian London without anyone remembering, perhaps we can forgive the anachronistic use of immersive theatre to facilitate the plot (although if the travellers had landed in an episode of ‘The Adventure Game’, that might have worked better and served a similar purpose). As well as the offbeat setting and the character with a grudge, there is a creepy alien presence – translucent giant spiders that cling to ceilings – and elements of alien technology that have ended up hidden as props in the play.

This smorgasbord of environment, unusual juxtaposition and surprise would be a great mix for a two-part Doctor Who story, whether as a standard dramatised serial or Companion Chronicle, but unfortunately as a short story, it does feel somewhat like an overegged pudding, and listeners may wish that writer Ian Atkins had chosen a smaller number of dramatic elements to combine (an alien presence in an immerse piece of theatre would have been a good enough plot alone, for example). Atkins isn’t a stranger to the short Who story format, having contributed to Short Trips collections both in print and on audio. The previous audio tale he penned – The Doctor’s First XI, free for subscribers whose sub included the March 2010 release, The Architects of History – was a simple but elegant tale of the Fourth Doctor and Romana using cricket to help a colony overcome their invasion traumas.

However, The King of the Dead is exploding with ideas, in a format that needs to be simple to succeed. The author is a good writer, and Sarah Sutton reads the story well (performing a great Tegan impression when needed), but like many of the Short Trips in this series, it’s overserved by an abundance of riches.

Overall, this half-hour production is well worth the download price, but might frustrate the listener that the confluence of disparate plot elements hadn’t been pruned or given more room to breathe.

The King of the Dead is available as a download for £2.99 from Big Finish now.

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