Thursday, July 28, 2016

The Curse of the Daleks by: David Whitaker and Terry Nation adapted and directed by: Nicholas Briggs: We Got Our Power!

The Curse of the Daleks stars Michael Praed as John Ladiver and Nicholas Briggs as the Daleks.  It was written by David Whitaker and Terry Nation, adapted and directed by Nicholas Briggs, and released in November 2008 by Big Finish Productions.

 

The least well known of the Doctor Who stage plays was The Curse of the Daleks, a story that didn’t even feature the Doctor or his companions.  Written at the height of Dalekmania, the story focuses on a possible solution as to how the Daleks were reactivated in between The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth with our main characters being the crew of a spaceship which has had to land on Skaro for repairs.  It is a product of its time.  The characters are standard pulp fiction and there are strong first-wave feminist motivations.  It was by no means progressive or regressive, but sits in the middle of that political spectrum.  The original play was by David Whitaker, from a summary of Terry Nation’s, and that credit really shows.  Once Nation gets the Daleks back to full power, the plot is a rehash of The Daleks.  This is where the main flaw of the story lies, with all David Whitaker’s efforts in the characters actually creating a diverse cast, the flaw is still present.  It rears its ugly head and any fan will realize exactly where the story is going to go next and exactly how it is going to go.

 

The plot is at the very least, the most consistent in structure of the stage plays as outside of the rehash it doesn’t follow the traditional Doctor Who format.  It instead follows the format of an adventure play as we get introduced to the characters, the crisis happens, an unlikely ally appears, there’s the twist of the traitor revealed and finally the escape.  It’s a formula that works really well on stage in the two act structure as the climax can be right when the Daleks have the hero’s captured and all things seem lost which is really how we end the first act.  The characters follow the clichés of adventures stories.  The main character is John Ladiver played by Michael Praed.  Ladiver is the typical hero in quite a few regards, but his actual gimmick is that he is a convict heading for prison for hiding millions in treasure.  He isn’t a space pirate as he has the galaxies interests at heart as he had already been to Skaro to investigate if the Daleks were actually dead.  Praed is the actor who steals the show here just by how smooth his voice is on audio.  Ladiver was originally played by John Line who returns here to play Professor Vanderlyn.  Vanderlyn is the absent minded professor, too wrapped up in his own work to really care.  He serves comic relief for the story which is funny enough and barely intrusive to the narrative.  It’s almost sweet that Big Finiuh tracked him down and made him a part of the proceedings.

 

The adaptation as written by Nicholas Briggs includes a narrator in the style of linking narration for the Missing Episode Soundtracks.  It is how the adaptation opens as a way to set the scene and just keeps interjecting at scene changes which would be done on stage.  Now I don’t have a problem with the narration in theory.  The opening poem, the ending and description of the spaceship really works, but whenever else it interjects into the action takes the listener out of the action really easily.  Briggs narrates the audio and has a voice that really works for the position of narrator, but he is barely needed.

 

To summarize, The Curse of the Daleks is honestly the best of the stage plays.  The plotting and pacing is great even though it is basically The Daleks without the entire Doctor Who plot.  Nicholas Briggs did his best to adapt the story into audio, but failed when he decided to add in a narrator when it really wasn’t needed.  The best things in the story are the acting with Michael Praed and John Line both being the best parts of the story and the characters  who are all archetypes that for once really work at creating a period piece.  70/100

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