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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