The New Regency Theatre is haunted and Jago, Litefoot and Leela witness the spirit of someone in a silver wheelchair floating over the stalls. This is the story of Alice – a young woman who had Swan Lake so cruelly taken from her…
The New Regency Theatre is haunted and Jago, Litefoot and Leela witness the spirit of someone in a silver wheelchair floating over the stalls. This is the story of Alice – a young woman who had Swan Lake so cruelly taken from her…
JAGO & LITEFOOT: SWAN SONG
The third story in the set, John Dorney’s “Swan Song,” is a bit of a departure from the typical Jago & Litefoot format. It’s set between two time periods, with a group of scientists around the present day performing time experiments and accidentally opening portals to the Victorian age, while Jago, Litefoot, and Leela investigate the effects of those portals from the other side. The story has a hallucinatory quality, as characters on each side of the time breach have dreamlike visions about potential futures – and it’s all tied together by Alice (Abigail Hollick), a paraplegic scientist who lost her ability to walk on the way to a ballet performance, and her desire to finally deliver her performance. While I appreciate the desire to do something different, I don’t think “Swan Song” holds together especially well – I think the “spirit of the theatre” is a difficult concept to entertain. The focus on the theatre also leads to one of my least favorite elements of drama about drama: endless quotations. It is not entertaining to hear characters quote Shakespeare at each other when they are not performing Shakespeare, nor is it fulfilling to have any subtlety robbed from the story when a character spells out the meaning of Swan Lake at the end. About the only element I enjoyed was Jago’s almost complete ignorance of Shakespeare contrasted against Litefoot’s much more comprehensive knowledge. Still, “Swan Song” is entertaining in spots, and it’s nice to know the series won’t be repeating the same plots over and over.
5/10