“They say there’ll be thousands pouring into Manchester tomorrow. From all over the county, north and south. It’ll be a piece of history. People will remember this!”
Lost in the smog of the Industrial Revolution, the TARDIS crashes four miles south of Manchester, in the grounds of Hurley Hall – a grand mansion belonging to a local factory owner, a proudly self-made man. But while Hurley dreams of growing richer still on the wealth of secret knowledge locked up in the Doctor’s time and space machine, his servants hope only for a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. His young maid Cathy, for instance, whom Nyssa learns is looking forward to joining the working people’s march to St Peter’s Field, in the heart of the city. There’ll be speeches and banners and music. It’ll be like one big jamboree…
Or so she thinks. For the city’s establishment have called in their own private militia, to control the crowd. One of the darkest days in Manchester’s history is about to unfold – and the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan are right in the thick of it.
THE PETERLOO MASSACRE
The final entry in this year’s Peter Davison trilogy is “The Peterloo Massacre” from Paul Magrs, and it stands as one of the most interesting and yet most frustrating Big Finish releases in recent memory. As a piece of drama it is quite often brilliantly gripping, yet it’s also as subtle as being smacked upside the head with a boat oar and features a nearly pointless final episode.
“The Peterloo Massacre” is about the historical event of the same name, when a large, peaceful assembly of working class protestors from in and around Manchester was attacked by the military, resulting in multiple deaths and hundreds of casualties. It’s considered one of the most brutal, repressive moments of that century in England, and Magrs does not shy away from that idea. This is presented in the grand tradition of the Hartnell historicals: there’s no celebrity, no alien influence, just the TARDIS crew thrown into a horrible situation and trying to survive until they can get back to the TARDIS and leave. By the time the Doctor realizes when and where they’ve landed, Tegan and Nyssa have become involved in local events, and much of the story is spent with the Doctor desperately trying to find his friends before they’re caught in the carnage. There is a building, pervasive sense of dread throughout the first three episodes of “The Peterloo Massacre” – you can hear each step down the road to the massacre, and you can hear each moment at which it could have been averted but wasn’t. When the massacre finally happens, as the climax to the third episode, the presentation is truly horrifying – Nigel Fairs deserves all the credit in the world for some particularly disturbing sound design. In many ways, this buildup and explosion resembles the TV story “The Massacre,” a story that is rightly perceived as a classic to this day.
Unfortunately, for everything that “Peterloo” does right, it also takes a number of drastic missteps. Chief among them is an utter lack of anything resembling subtlety: virtually every guest character in the story is lovingly drawn from the finest stock clichés. Hurley (Robbie Stevens) is everything you’d expect from a villainous industrialist: he cares for nothing but profit, he holds the lives of his workers in disregard, he’s a “self-made man” who holds the working class in contempt because they didn’t better themselves like he did, and so forth. His wife (Liz Morgan) is even more over the top, irrationally dismissing Cathy (Hayley Jayne Standing) from her service and ordering Nyssa out of the house. The soldiers are cackling drunks to a man. And the working class characters are no better – Cathy is the noble, heroic maid who wants to better herself, while her father (Wayne Forester) is representative of the old order, exhorting his daughter to know her place and never question her betters. Even Tegan is relentlessly one-note, unable to keep her mouth shut for even a moment about inequality and workers’ rights. About the only character with any depth outside of the Doctor and Nyssa is William (Gerard Kearns), but even he’s just hopelessly naïve.
And then there’s the final episode, which I’m still struggling to understand. The massacre happens at the end of episode three – this is both the historical and dramatic climax of the story, meaning that Magrs leaves a full quarter of the running time for denouement. Some of this is put to good use: seeing what happens to Cathy and her son, for example, and giving us some of the most intense acting we’ve ever heard from Sarah Sutton. But for most of the episode we follow Hurley as he has a crisis of conscience, suddenly wondering if slaughtering unarmed innocents was a good idea or not. I’m not sure if I was supposed to feel any sympathy for him, but trying to add depth to a character that just spent three episodes as a screamingly unsubtle villain strikes me as a misstep. There’s also the question of the parentage of the baby: it’s plain from the start that the baby is Cathy’s son, not her little brother, but I don’t think that was supposed to be a big surprise. But who’s the father? All the evidence points to William, and right at the end Nyssa dramatically reveals this to his parents. Shock! Horror! The wealthy industrialist’s son has been dallying with the maid! The family is disgraced! But no – actually, Nyssa was wrong, and William is not the father. So who was? We never find out, because immediately after that “revelation,” the crew leaves in the TARDIS! What on earth was the point of any of that?
I mentioned before that Sarah Sutton turns in a powerful performance in this story, one that’s quite unexpected given her usual reserved performance. But Peter Davison steals the show: his Doctor is absolutely infuriated by the massacre and its surrounding events, and utterly frustrated at his inability to intervene. It’s so rare to hear the fifth Doctor genuinely angry, and his righteous fury is therefore shocking and powerful listening. I’m very pleased to hear one of the lead actors being challenged by a Big Finish script, and even more pleased to hear an actor of his considerable talent rising to the occasion.
Overall, then, “The Peterloo Massacre” is a mixed bag. At its best, it’s comparable to the very best Big Finish releases. At its worst, it’s crushingly unsubtle and seems to waste its final episode. So it’s tough to give a score – but I enjoyed listening despite the flaws.
Recommended, ultimately.
7/10