Tuesday 13 February 2018

Big Finish Reviews+ Kingdom of Lies by Tony J Fyler



‘Up the Republic!’ says Tony.

Kingdom of Lies is a comedy of royalty and vanity, with occasional assassins, very occasional mishaps and more than a handful of references to British royal shenanigans over the last few decades.

A duke and a duchess, not long married and realising they hate each other, have divided the city of Cardenas right down the middle, with a blue zone and a red zone, and an enormously precise line that must not ever ever ever be crossed on pain of dungeon-wallowing and possibly death. They conduct a PR war to each appear the more wounded, the more compassionate, in order to win the love of the people, as a way of sticking it to each other, and potentially manoeuvring to a position of practical power over each other, the duke determined to keep his duchess’ dowry, the duchess intending to one day become the sole ruler of the duchy. They’re both, when it comes down to it, the kind of people you’d stab yourself in the leg with forks rather than spend any real time with.

And then the Fifth Doctor’s full Tardisload arrive, and are easily divided by virtue of where they happen to be standing, half the team going to the duke’s dungeons, the other half to the duchess’.

It’s a story premise you’d expect from the Graham Williams/Douglas Adams era of Who, which rather proves how dedicated a performer Tom Baker actually was in selling their premises, because it doesn’t quite work with Peter Davison’s gang. There’s a degree of solid comedy from this particular Doctor being mistaken for an elusive assassin, and Sarah Sutton gives it her best pantomime effort as Nyssa, his deadly assistant – ‘He murders for money, I kill because I like it!’ – but a little too much of the story’s wiring is left on show for it to be truly immersive: the Doctor and Nyssa are ‘assassins’ brought in to kill the duchess, while Tegan and Adric are security consultants who can help the duchess defeat the assassins hired by her husband, and round and round and round we go, powered mostly by satire and the need to Do Stuff.

It’s not by any means a bad story, Kingdom of Lies – it’ll keep you entertained for a couple of hours, and if you like enclosed stories with stakes that are both high and a tiiiiny bit Moffatty (in that nobody who seems to be dead should necessarily be presumed dead, ever. Or, in fact, presumed to be what they seem), you’ll have enough fun with Kingdom of Lies to listen to it again a little while. If you happen to give a fig about, for instance, the heartache of the Charles and Diana years of British history, you might well find Something About Which You Can Be Offended, because writers Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky take a ruthlessly ‘plague on both your houses’ approach to skewering royal vanity, with allusions which feel obvious enough to punch, but as long as you don’t give the aforementioned fig, there’s fun to be had with, for instance, the duchess demanding her transport be crashed, so she can stumble bloodied from the wreckage into the glare of sympathetic publicity, and blame the pilot.
In a dislocation from any sense of reality, things get rather more fun again when the in-laws turn up – with the duchess’ dad (played with good bluster and imaginary bushy moustache by Tim Bentinck) declaring war on the duchy, and then nipping off to put a bet on the result. Richenda Carey, as Duchess Miranda’s mother, is a bonus to the production, adding energy and a sense of matriarchal power to proceedings. It’s fair to say though that things start to flag by the time the assassin the Doctor’s been pretending to be arrives in person, and it’s less than helpful that they’re played by Patsy Kensit, who fits neatly in a long line of actresses who turn in stolid performances and say the lines they’re given, despite clearly having very little idea what they’re doing – Beryl Reid and Joan Sims, we salute you.
Overall, Kingdom of Lies is a fluffy bit of royal fun that does very little harm and entertains for its running time. Will it change your life or push you to new depths of appreciation for what Doctor Who on audio can do? No, but then it’s not really trying to do that. It’s entertaining and fun and when it tries to make a deeper point about people who attach themselves to people in power to advance their own position by stoking conflict, it largely succeeds – no mean feat, because that’s a message that could easily have been lost in the spinning together of strands as the story comes to its conclusion.

Spend a vacation in the Kingdom of Lies – you’ll have a laugh, and then get on with your day.

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