The Suffering
FEBRUARY 2010
(4 EPISODES)
1. AN UNEARTHING
2. PILTDOWN WOMAN
3. THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES
4. THE SHARING
The Suffering
is something of a cornerstone for the Companion Chronicles.
For
the first time, Big Finish have put together two companions whose
Doctor is no longer with us, providing us with a sound that is as close to
the relevant television serials as we’re ever likely to get. But, as if
this weren’t an enticing enough gimmick in itself, the release is made up
of four episodes spread across two discs instead of just two crammed onto
one, giving subscribers of the range more bang for their buck whilst again
bringing us closer to the feel of the generally-longer television serials.
The opening of the first episode sets the stall for what’s to come.
Maureen O’Brien’s Vicki and Peter Purves’ Steven have decided to orally
document the events of their most recent adventure, for reasons that will
be revealed at the end of the story. The trouble is, they can’t agree on
how to go about doing it. As script editor of the range, author Jacqueline
Rayner knows better than anybody the pros and cons of each of the framing
devices and narrative styles that a Companion Chronicle writer
might employ, and through Vicki and Steven’s rampant bickering she mirrors
the creative and critical debates that talking books inevitably provoke.
Should characters always narrate in the first person? If so, doesn’t it
betray the fact that they’ll survive the story, killing much of the drama?
Vicki is hilarious as she initially tries to recount the story
omnisciently, spouting Targety prose about how “plucky orphan Vicki” and
“handsome space pilot Steven Taylor” blundered into a plot concerning the
suffragette movement and the skull of the so-called “missing link,” the
infamous “Piltdown Man”, before realising that she’d only experienced part
of the story, and has to turn to Steven to fill in the blanks. In itself,
this freedom allows Rayner to tell a much broader and deeper tale than the
usual deluge of “I did this” and “I felt that”, offering us two narrative
threads, as the television series invariably would.
Things soon settle down as Steven narrates the preponderance of the
first two episodes in typical Companion Chronicle style, and Vicki
the latter two. Throughout, however, Steven deals with his own dialogue,
as does Vicki hers, although every once in a while (more often than not
after a cliffhanger), Rayner brings us back to the present to have Vicki
gently mock Steven “screaming like a girl” (an amusing jibe, given the
themes of sexism explored here), or to have Steven ask Vicki plot-related
questions.
Steven’s half of the story rattles along at a feverish pace, and is
punctuated with some incredibly animated set pieces that I would have
loved to have seen on the telly. The sequence where the erstwhile
space pilot is pursued through the streets by a 1912 bobby (as people have
complained that he has human bones hanging out of his bag!) would normally
have been the highlight of any tale, particularly when it concludes with a
skeleton being dressed in a suit and hidden on a bus, but Rayner tops even
this with a delightful ‘Doctor does Mr Toad’ automobile sequence. The
first Doctor – goggles, flat cap and all – careering about wildly in an
old-school motor, acquiring chickens, branches, and all manner of debris
as he goes is utterly priceless, and is made even more so thanks to
Purves’ pitch-perfect William Hartnell impression.
However, it’s Vicki’s thread that contains the real meat of The
Suffering. Given the delicate subject matter traversed here, I
half-expected to find a preachy, feminist manifesto masked by an alien
skull, but Rayner’s script is anything but. In fact, it’s one of the most
objective and brutally forthright first Doctor stories that you’re likely
to find anywhere. The scenes dealing with the plight of the suffragettes
are handled with harrowing elegance, O’Brien and Purves’ deliberately
flat, defeated narration conspiring to create haunting images in the mind
of the listener that aren’t easily shaken. These are then beautifully
interwoven with Rayner’s main narrative, which pushes the envelope ever
further still with its gross scenes of torture and beheading, culminating
in one blazingly ironic revelation. As I listened to the play, I found
myself thinking that
“The Suffering” was about as apt a title as
one could imagine, but by its end, I’d decided that it was a definite
understatement.
On balance, The Suffering is certainly one of the most
outstanding Companion Chronicles, not because of its gimmicks but
because of its heart. It is, without question, ‘The’ Vicki story, and
plenty more besides. The performances are exquisite, the production is
first-rate, and the story itself is one of Rayner’s finest to date. After
a few years scrabbling about on Amazon, eBay and Play playing
Companion Chronicle catch-up, it’s made a subscriber out of me.
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Before the
review, a little autobiographical
information: I live in Haywards Heath in Sussex, a mere nine miles from Piltdown. Since my early days,
I’ve had a fascination with fossils and prehistory, and I can also admire
the audacity and cleverness of a well-planned hoax.
It
will be of no surprise
then
when I say that I’ve always loved the
story
of the Piltdown Man - the
celebrated missing link between man and beast that turned out to be
nothing more than a cobbled together chimaera;
a human skull affixed to the jawbone of an orangutan.
Of course, the forgery wasn’t discovered
-
or rather, wasn’t accepted
-
until
forty years after the original discovery of the ‘fossil,’ after much
scientific debate
about
humanity’s evolutionary history. Altogether, it’s a bit of an
embarrassment.
So, the prospect of a Doctor Who story concerning the Piltdown Man
is, to my mind, long overdue. In fairness, I was expecting a wholly
predictable ‘revelation’ that the skull was not a fake at all, but instead
belonged to the body of an alien life form. It’s obvious route to follow
when tying the tale into the Doctor Who universe. In effect, that’s
what we got, although it was done with far more panache, intelligence and
creativity than that might imply. For one thing, we
learn
that the original Piltdown skull was a psychically-active
alien relic (shades of The Hand of Fear), but that the one that was
studied down the years was indeed a fake,
cobbled
together by the Doctor to preserve the path of history. Secondly, this was
no Piltdown Man, but a Piltdown Woman!
This
is the crucial matter, for the whole Piltdown plot is
dressing for an extremely worthwhile, powerfully told treatise on
feminism, misogyny and equality. Since
the skull was discovered in 1912, the
very
year that
the Suffragette movement reached its height, a link isn’t as contrived as
it might seem. The very fact that the skull was taken seriously for so
long has much to
do with the patriarchal scientific establishment and its reluctance to
admit error - it wouldn’t do for the great
men of natural philosophy to admit they’d been duped
and lose face. The
Suffering,
however, takes these
politics as its starting point but then moves
on
to the
visceral real life consequences. Events in London are
shown for how they were
-
rallies turning to violence
and appalling police brutality, although no doubt some
members of the authorities acted far worse than was
permissible to illustrate in the
production.
The story’s
title is entirely appropriate, particularly during the last
episode,
The Sharing,
as Vicki and Steven, through
the psychic power of the alien, experience memories
of women who were imprisoned, brutalised and force-fed
as punishment for
their protests. Genuinely shocking and uncomfortable to listen to, this
a powerful portrayal of a critical period of history that led to women
gaining rights that many
now take for granted. It’s all the more affecting for having not only
Vicki relate these
scenes, but Steven
too,
driving home the point that everyone deserves rights and respect
regardless of their sex.
The great strength of the
production
is that, throughout its attack on the established order of the time, it
never loses sight of the need for equality. Jacqueline Rayner takes great
pains to portray the outright hatred of men as just as abhorrent as a
man’s hatred of women. Clearly illustrating the fine line between feminism
and misandrony,
The Suffering
takes a mature and balanced approach to the subject matter. It’s made
clear throughout that the villain, the disembodied alien exile, is
completely in the wrong for wishing to destroy all males, despite her
beliefs stemming from her own abusive treatment on her homeworld. While
the alien may share some beliefs and experiences with the
human
Suffragettes, it is abundantly clear that her anger and her actions have
taken her too far.
This isn’t to say that The Suffering is a dry, preachy piece. Far
from it, the play is peppered with action and scenes of humour that break
up the heavier aspects of the drama, supported by pitch
perfect performances by Maureen O’Brien and Peter Purves, both recreating
their roles in the series with precision. Rayner is well-known as a fan of
the Hartnell era, and this is clear in her writing here. She’s also not
averse for dropping the occasional fan-pleasing reference. Amongst the
powerful, terrible events occurring throughout this play, there’s the
inescapable hint that we’ve heard a sneaky hint at the origins of a
Hartnell-era alien race. Having overthrown men on her planet, creating an
all-female society with a handful of men kept only for reproduction, has
the Piltdown Woman revealed herself to be the creator of… the dreaded
Drahvins?
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