Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: James Purefoy, Jessica Raine, Nicky Henson, Anton Lesser, Heather Craney, Stuart McLoughlin, Clive Howard, Danny Sapani, Jaimi Barbakoff, Wilf Scolding.
It is often a frustration that comes in waves, that no matter how incredible the film Blade Runner is, how mesmerising the feel of the story is, it somehow, like all adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s glorious output, is left feeling altered, bereft of the soul of the man to whom so much is owed.
The greatest argument for adapting a book is that it brings out qualities for the screen that might not have been envisaged in the writer’s mind when they first undertook the occupancy of the chair and the pen, that the change in reader’s perceptions of what makes a film viable in their time is always of the uppermost importance. The writer is relegated to the point of having the by-line thrust before their name which fits to serve only as a muse, rather than be considered as the direct authority in which the story has been written.
Some stories that are modified and converted are more succinct in their full appreciation of the original work, and so it is to the two-part radio drama adapted by Jonathan Holloway of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
A world ravaged by Nuclear War, in which humanity in some form, survived, but which took almost every other creature on the planet to its demise, to its extinction, and which now finds the urge to replicate any animal in a synthetic or robot form. It is a world in which the ethics of our time as voyeurs in this differing landscape and alternate history of Earth are asked the question of what makes us human when we have allowed all other forms of life to disappear.
At a higher level, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? plays with understandable fear of how we feel when we know we can be replaced, that we are not unique, that our own vanity is such that we have the technology to create something in our own image but deny it the right to live and experience; in this response we find ourselves not as a just God in human form, but as a dictator displaying the whims of ego and subjecting slavery on those to whom we deprive growth to.
If you were to peel back the skin which covers your face and see the lie of life before you, is all that you knew a false premise, will have been worth every non breathe you took?
Directed by Sasha Yevtushenko, and starring James Purefoy as Rick Deckard, Jessica Raine as Rachel Rosen and the indomitable Anton Lesser as Eldon Rosen, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is an admirable adaption which keeps the element of Noir keenly at the forefront of the tale and which does reach out to those who wish to see a difference in the way that Blade Runner could have been.
If there is a downside to this particular endeavour it is in way that the audience have already got the vision of Harrison Ford, Sean Young and Rutger Hauer deeply engrained in their minds; this should not dissuade the listener from immersing themselves into the audio drama, instead it can act as a catalyst to seeking out Philip K. Dick’s work and understanding the voice of the creator of such worlds.
A thought-provoking adaptation of one of Philip K. Dick’s major works, one in which radio does justice too.
Ian D. Hall