Jago, Leela and Ellie take a trip to the theatre to see Oscar Wilde’s new play and discover something sinister during the interval. Meanwhile, bodies are turning up at Litefoot’s lab, while wilde meets his biggest fan…
Jago, Leela and Ellie take a trip to the theatre to see Oscar Wilde’s new play and discover something sinister during the interval. Meanwhile, bodies are turning up at Litefoot’s lab, while wilde meets his biggest fan…
JAGO & LITEFOOT: BEAUTIFUL THINGS
Jago & Litefoot has largely stayed away from introducing “celebrity” characters from the time period, but that’s certainly not the case in John Dorney’s “Beautiful Things,” which features none other than Oscar Wilde (Alan Cox). Dorney and Cox do a wonderful job of introducing Wilde into the world of the infernal investigators – he’s portrayed not entirely as an arrogant jerk but rather as a man in a constant state of melancholy knowing that very few people in the world are on his intellectual level. And each character reacts differently to him: Jago is naturally an admirer – the scene where Wilde bests him at alliteration is wonderful – Litefoot finds him insufferable, and Leela doesn’t understand why he is acclaimed in the first place. And then there’s the mysterious Gad, a Dorian Gray homage that maintains his youth by shunting the passage of time into an elderly avatar. And his scheme gets down to the main question of the play: what is art and what is its value? An infinite library, existing (like the TARDIS) extradimensionally, is draining human minds and constructing art by assembly line: each book on the shelf contains a slightly different combination of words in infinite iterations. Gad thinks this will allow him to consume all possible art, but it takes Wilde to explain that art derives from an act of creation, not random chance. Given enough time, a room full of monkeys and typewriters might one day produce Hamlet, but it would be lost under billions of iterations of meaningless nonsense. I could go on – the characterization is great, the dialogue is smart throughout – but suffice it to say that “Beautiful Things” is quite good, a highlight of the range thus far.
9/10