Thursday, 7 September 2017

Big Finish Reviews+ Son of the Dragon by Tony J Fyler


Tony Fyler’s at the sharp end of history.

The ‘pure historical’ story – where there was no alien menace, just the Doctor and friends getting mixed up in the toing and froing of actual human history - was baked into the original bones of Doctor Who’s remit to be an informative adventure show, principally for children, but which the whole family could enjoy and learn from.

And bless them, when they started out, they tried really hard to make them work – some of the historicals in the First and Second Doctor’s era are among the finest stories of their eras, including the likes of The Aztecs, Marco Polo, The Crusades, The Reign of Terror and The Highlanders. The pure historicals, in the hands of the likes of Donald Cotton, could also act as a semi-farcical alternate take on some of the BBC’s prime sixties content, like Western serials and Roman melodramas, mercilessly comedy-Who’d as they were by The Gunfighters and The Romans.

But as now, so in the sixties, viewing figures ruled, and it was found that what the majority of viewers wanted from Doctor Who was exciting space adventure, rather than six episodes of explanation that turned the Tardis into a schoolroom – you could jusssst about get away with playing Tlotoxl the Aztec priest on the playground, looking for victims to sacrifice, but it was much more fun to be a Dalek and exterminate your playmates.

So the pure historical stories died a death in Doctor Who until the Fifth Doctor’s age, and then had but the briefest of resurgences in Black Orchid before sinking once again beneath the surface of a science fantasy imperative.

Big Finish has always been adamant that the pure historical is part of its remit in taking Classic Doctors forward into new areas, and the company’s always done them as well as the very best of the TV output, often busting myths and showing the more complex interplay of personalities behind the legends we think we know.

As such then, the Doctor versus Dracula is a story that’s always been more or less inevitable – the real nobleman behind the literary vampire offers enormous scope for the complex, tangled interplay of allegiances, misunderstandings, and hair-trigger tempers of which the best pure historicals are made, with the Doctor and his friends prone to buffeting from side to side, and up and down the social strata too. Son of the Dragon (the local name for Dracula while he was alive) is that story, with writer Steve Lyons aiming to paint a broad social and political landscape of intrigue against which to best show off the dour, clever, ruthless, patriotic ball of contradictions that was Vlad Drakul. We find him at war with the Sultan Mehmet for the lands of Walachia, and his notorious reputation for impaling those who displeased him is quickly shown to us. Lyons does well in terms of not shying away from the harshness that made Dracula’s legend before Bram Stoker ever got his hands on him, and you could even argue that listening to Son of the Dragon in 2017 is of strong contemporary relevance, as it paints a picture of a man who ultimately feels he can trust no-one, who’s not above throwing even those who love him to the wolves or off the battlements, and who has precisely zero tolerance for the idea that he can ever be wrong.

Given that both the time, the place and the central character offer so much richness for Who-style storytelling, it’s fascinating that it’s the Fifth Doctor who gets to experience this story – Doctors Four or Six would undoubtedly be more at home in the period, Doctor Seven would be a great, quiet, dark foil to Dracula’s rage, but the Fifth Doctor was always an incarnation able, and prone, to get things wrong, to improvise, to think on his feet, being less able than many of his former and future selves to impose by force of distinct personality. That said, Lyons’ script brings out some great Doctoring from Davison, akin to the likes of The Awakening – he’s happy to gibber, but when provoked, the gibber instantly falls away and there, like a moment of Troughton genius, there’s the Doctor, knowing everything, assessing everything, balancing every variable and trying hard to smooth the universe along with a smile. It’s a peculiar Tardis team to drop into this time frame too, Peri the American botanist stretching herself and her skillset rather more than she got to do on screen through most of her run, and Erimem, the Egyptian Pharaoh who seems to view her journey into time and space as one long opportunity to marry a difficult, powerful man and make his life easier, getting courted first by a soldier of the Sultan with secrets of his own, Radu ‘the Handsome,’ and then by Dracula himself. The trio are cast as spies, victims, a potential fool and two concubines, stabbed, forced to make their way across a battlefield protected by just a tent pole, and made to endure other such jolly japes as the battle for Walachia rages. In other words, it’s classic pure historical stuff in the finest ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ traditions of The Aztecs and The Crusaders. More than that though, in that same tradition, it allows the three Tardis travellers to provide three angles and viewpoints on the central character who comes to be known as Vlad the Impaler. Peri’s view is simple, black and white – Drac bad, boo hiss! The Doctor argues for history to be viewed in its own context, while Erimem, while by no means giving the Prince of Darkness too full a rein, is able to see the goodness in the man, beyond the paranoia and the ruthlessness.

It all makes for involving – if occasionally rather theatrical and slightly exhausting – listening, and there is, as per most of the pure historicals, a good deal of toing and froing in the mid-section, which leads to the suspicion that most of history is taken up with the travelling. But this is Davison, Nicola Bryant as Peri and Caroline Morris as Erimem each on good form, and matched with actors of the calibre of James Purefoy as Dracula, and Douglas Hodge as Radu.

There are, let’s not forget, a thousand ways in which the Doctor versus Dracula could go very badly wrong. Son of the Dragon avoids the vast majority of them. If the middle feels a little soggy with to-and-fro, and if the whole set-up has the whiff of theatricality, forgive it for the sake of involving drama, rich performances, and a pure historical that evokes the best of the past, while turning the screw of historical pressure and interpretation in a whole new Big Finish way. 

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