Thursday, 7 September 2017

Reviews Torchwood The Dying Room by Tony J Fyler


The joy of a show like Torchwood, once you free it from the confines of episodic TV and make it an anthology audio series, is that it has a long history and a longer future in which you can set stories. Big Finish has certainly taken advantage of that potential since it took over the rights to tell Torchwood stories – it’s taken us back to Victorian, original Torchwood, forward into the far future with the Torchwood Archive, ahead of the TV show but with its core cast, across the Atlantic to Torchwood America in the mid-seventies, back before vital team members died, and even back before the formation of Torchwood Cardiff as we know it, with the Canary Wharf, moderately fascistic, undoubtedly pro-Brexit Torchwood London. What we’ve never seen till now – ironically enough, given where we first encountered Captain Jack Harkness – is Torchwood’s War. What were the protectors of the Empire doing while Hitler’s horrors were marching across Europe being homicidal and gittish to everyone who wasn’t them?

It’s perhaps a more loaded question than one might at first expect – Torchwood’s moral core has always been at the very best a murky, gritty, human grey, rather than anything clear and clean and shining, so you could make an argument that they wouldn’t, in principle, be against Nazi ideas in principle. But on the other hand, Torchwood has always been rooted in an arrogance, a self-possession, and a belief that it should be the custodian of all the most dangerous alien artefacts, both because it is responsible enough to know the ‘right’ thing to do with them, and because of its fundamental core belief – that the ‘right’ thing to do with them is to keep Britain safe and advance her interests, rather than those of any other nation.
The Dying Room, by Lizzie Hopley, introduces us to at least a little of what Torchwood was up to during World War II, and there’s a grimness and a gravitas to it that befits the situation. In terms of a scenario, it’s more or less a tight two-hander, with occasional expansion outside the so-called Dying Room. And for the most part, it shows us an interrogation of a quiet academic by the Nazis.

It’s worth mentioning that the academic, M LeDuc, is played by Simon Russell Beale, because that will give you an idea of the calibre of performance at work in this audio. Mark Elstob too, as Herr Grau, the interrogator, is pitch perfect throughout this story, which for the most part sings like an agitated violin, on just a handful of notes, wearing your resistance down and leaving you raw and tense, but absolutely unable to turn away from it – don’t try and listen to The Dying Room while you’re doing something else, and don’t try to do it in chunks, however great the temptation is to give yourself a breather from the intensity of it. It deserves you, all the way through, not just because of course real people died in real rooms at the hands of real men and women with fanatical zeal, but also because the writing, the direction and the performances are set that high, that tense, that to break your concentration during The Dying Room is to do everyone involved a disservice – including yourself.

If you’re thinking that a Nazi interrogation doesn’t sound terribly Torchwood, don’t despair – there’s plenty of creepy weirdness going on outside the room, with a virus that turns people into slavering, unintelligible monsters. That in fact is the pretext of the interrogation – Grau smells Torchwood at work, and tries to prove that LeDuc is something to do with it all.
There’s a vibe of ‘wartime Usual Suspects’ about the whole thing, and we the listener suspect, with Grau, that there’s more to LeDuc than meets the eye fairly early on, but what is actually going on is a refreshing surprise when we find it out, bringing an Indiana Jones ripple of satisfaction, and a justice that pleases, without being pinpoint-guessable till the pieces are meant to fall into place. Along the way, we also discover more or less where Torchwood’s heart actually lies in the whole ‘conflict of nations’ and get a brave, modern but believable repudiation of Nazi and supremacist ideologies into the bargain.

Torchwood The Dying Room is not, at almost any point, fun. It’s a Nazi interrogation, you don’t expect fun from that scenario. What it is though is tense, sweaty, nerve-shredding drama, played by some excellent actors, and directed by Scott Handcock like the 18-rated version of a black and white war film. It’s one to pick up for its dramatic qualities, and for the experience of going through it, rather than because it will give you a happy hour. But like all the best dramas, you’ll emerge at the end of it feeling like you’ve been through the emotional wringer, but that it was well worth the journey.

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