The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough and Nyssa to the University of Frodsham, close to where the warrior queen Æthelfrid fought a desperate and bloody rearguard action against the savage Danes. Over a thousand years later, in 1983, battle is still being raged, with student activists taking on savage funding cuts… and disrupting a conference about Æthelfrid convened by history professor John Bleak.
Meanwhile, over in the Physics Department, Dr Philippa Stone is working night and day on a top-secret project – but can her theoretical time machine really be the solution to the university’s problems?
Present and past are about to collide – and the results, as the TARDIS crew is about to discover, will be far from academic!
THE LADY OF MERCIA
After resurrecting an old foe in “Eldrad Must Die!” the anniversary year Peter Davison trilogy rolls on with “The Lady of Mercia,” a pseudo-historical from long time audio scribe Paul Magrs. It’s certainly a lighthearted, fun piece, something I suspect is clearing the way for a rather grim third story, but unfortunately it doesn’t amount to much when everything is said and done.
The story takes place in two locations: the University of Frodsham in 1983 and the kingdom of Mercia approximately one thousand years earlier. Magrs’ script moves easily between these two time periods, with coincident action in both – this device seems rather obvious in a time travel show, but it’s rarely seen in Doctor Who, even today. I like the way the editing and the writing go together here, often using a battle cry to transition between settings: it gives the play a fast-paced, modern feeling, something which isn’t always apparent in Big Finish. I also like the story’s sense of humor: it never takes itself particularly seriously, and the actors are clearly having a great time with the material.
Unfortunately, the story often veers too far in the wrong direction, and this is readily apparent in the 1983 university scenes. If his Wikipedia bio is correct, Magrs is a former university lecturer in English literature, which may explain the apparent contempt on display for the university system. Off-screen administrators are focused on money above all else, professors visiting a history conference are almost universally pompous idiots, and students holding a sit-in protest are naïve, uninformed children. Knowing a humanities lecturer with a similar view of his surroundings, I understand the tone of Magrs’ script, but the end result is a first episode that bogs down dreadfully. The Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan, and Turlough roam a university full of boring and/or stupid people and easily lie their way into the conference – yes, the Doctor is there to investigate unusual temporal readings, but couldn’t there be a compelling character around for them to interact with? Even the two significant characters, Professors Bleak (Anthony Howell) and Stone (Abigail Thaw), are more wrapped up in marital problems than inventing time travel.
And it doesn’t get much better when the story changes settings. While the Dark Ages are largely underexplored, both in Doctor Who and in scholarship in general, there’s really nothing here to impress. Æthelfrid is a generic cunning warlord – there’s a smart person underneath all the yelling and fighting, believe it or not! – and her daughter, Ælfwynn, might as well be Xena, Warrior Princess. It’s not that they’re bad characters – they’re sympathetic and entertaining – but there’s nothing complex or surprising here. And while we’re on the subject of the characters, the regulars get shortchanged again, something that seems to happen more and more often with this crew. Peter Davison is great, of course, and seems more exasperated than usual, which is fun, while Janet Fielding gets the best role in the script, including a difficult accidental killing. Mark Strickson, however, doesn’t do anything other than offer the occasional cutting remark, and Sarah Sutton might as well have stayed home for everything that Nyssa gets to do.
I alluded to this before, but the production is fantastic. Ken Bentley’s direction is excellent – it’s rare to enjoy the actual storytelling techniques of a Big Finish play, but that’s definitely the case here. Steve Foxon’s sound design, meanwhile, does its job very well, with an effective score to boot. Overall, “The Lady of Mercia” is an entertaining production without much to say. Magrs has a unique voice in Doctor Who audio, and it’s great to hear it again, but the story is lacking the depth that marks the best of his material. Most of the characters are paper-thin and even the regulars don’t do particularly well. The word “disposable” comes immediately to mind, but if we’re looking for something less pejorative, well… I’m sure it’ll come to me as soon as I publish this.
Not necessary.
5/10