Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Christopher Benjamin, Trevor Baxter, Lisa Bowerman, Duncan Wisbey, Conrad Asquith, Jennie Stoller, Alex Mallinson.

It seems that the theatre can be bad for the health; especially when it involves the Theatre De Fantasie and Henry Gordon Jago’s desire and yearning to be back on top of the impresario game.

Series Two of Jago and Litefoot’s enquiries into the world of the infernal and nefarious leads neatly to the stage where a slight supposed diversion, a chance for the action to become diverting enough before the final curtain comes down with an enjoyable story by Jonathan Morris which tests the wits and friendship of the two investigators in The Theatre Of Dreams.

Jonathan Morris’ scripts, whether for the main range of Doctor Who stories or any of the numerous spin-off series, deal with the idea of friendship and the relationship it forges between either two people or even a crowd very well. Mr Morris takes this friendship down a slightly different avenue though with two very good reflective sections in which comradeship can be tested. The first when one of the friends becomes so immersed into their work, the need to show so much willing and prove to their new employer that they are capable of holding down their new position, leaving the other wondering if they will see them again and secondly, when things have gone so well for one of them that the other then suffers from jealousy to the point that a friendship which had already been tested starts to creak and strain. Thankfully Jago and Litefoot are too good to write for to let anything really serious come between them for too long.

Jonathan Morris somehow also manages to fit in to the hour audio the question of what is reality and what is imagined, what the audience perceives to be real, the perfect allusion to the theatre and illusion to drama that can be captured in an hour’s worth of story. However, whereas the story jogs along as if the play was in danger of over running and the crowd assembled getting restless for the bar, the main adversaries in the play don’t have the same feel of evil or cunning that people listening to the Jago and Litefoot series may have become used to and in some dark corner feel as cardboard or thin as those introduced in The Unquiet Dead in the first series of the re-vamped Doctor Who series eight years ago.

As with The Unquiet Dead though, the star isn’t the villain of the piece. In The Unquiet Dead it was the sight of the marvellous Simon Callow as the Victorian author Charles Dickens who is mesmerised and astounded by what he witnesses, the counterpart in The Theatre Of Dreams is the reappearance of a very old enemy right towards the end of the audio. The joy of battling and defeating the latest foe is countered perfectly by a voice from the past which sets up the final story perfectly.

Although not quite up there as stories for Jago and Litefoot go, it is an excellent distraction as the audience prepares for the final confrontation ahead.

The Theatre Of Dreams is part of Jago and Litefoot Series Two which is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street.

Ian D. Hall