The Early Adventures: The Night Witches (Big Finish)Bookmark and Share

Sunday, 19 November 2017 - Reviewed by Peter Nolan
The Night Witches (Credit: Big Finish)
Written By: Roland Moore
Directed By: Helen Goldwyn

Cast
Anneke Wills (Polly Wright/Narrator), Frazer Hines (Jamie McCrimmon/The Doctor), Elliot Chapman (Ben Jackson), Anjella Mackintosh(Tatiana Kregki), Wanda Opalinska (Nadia Vasney), Kristina Buikaite (Lilya Grankin).
Producer David Richardson
Script Editor John Dorney
Executive Producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs
Cover: Tom Webster
Originally Released: September 2017

Review can be a funny business. If you’re a reviewer working across a large canvas it’s likely you’ll regularly come across things you can’t stand. A newspaper cinema critic who hates horror films still has to review them; a book reviewer may still need to struggle through three volumes of Fifty Shades Made a Lot of Money Didn’t It So Why Not Me? even though they’d rather set fire to their eyelids. But the smaller and more specific your turf the more likely you are to, well, be predisposed to like the material. If you’re working on a Science Fiction magazine it would be odd if your every review began “As someone who loathes SF on principle…” If you’re looking at something even more singular, like a particular TV show, it’s pretty likely it’s a TV show you like. And if reviews of audio plays based on that TV show are being handed out, it’s to be expected if they’re given to people who don’t hate audio as a medium.

The Early Adventures, though, exist in a niche within a niche within a niche. And it’s one, I confess, I’m not predisposed towards. When Big Finish decided to evolve their Companion Chronicles range by recasting crucial roles, I was instinctively not a fan of the concept. For me “the Second Doctor”, for instance, was not shorthand for “the Doctor sometime between the events at Snowcap Base and his being put on trial by the Time Lords” but for “the Doctor as portrayed by Patrick Troughton,” actor and performance too bound up in each to be substituted for anything else.

I wish I could say that The Night Witches caused the scales to fall from my eyes and for me to be converted into a true believer but unfortunately I have to say doubts about the soundness of the concept still linger. The format of the Early Adventures leads to an odd mish-mash of voices that take a very long time to get used to. We’ve got original Polly Anneke Wills pulling double duty as Narrator and as Polly, Frazer Hines similarly playing both Jamie and the Doctor, while there’s a new Ben in the form of Elliot Chapman. Part of the essential suspension of disbelief with many Big Finish ranges is accepting that the actors sound older than they did at the time, but that’s made harder by pairing them with a Ben who’s genuinely forty years their junior. Hines’ double duty is a particularly strange listening experience as he actually now sounds more like the Doctor than Jamie, even when playing the Scotsman. And while his Doctor is a fair approximation of Troughton’s voice and accent it really misses the sense of the great man’s performance. Troughton was an actor who could seemingly effortlessly spin a line reading on its side half way through to do something unexpected and brilliant. It’s part of the reason why, in his hands, even the clunkiest of rushed scripts could sound compelling and witty when coming out of the Doctor’s mouth. And, as much of a legend as Frazer Hines is, there’s not much sense of that in his reading of the Doctor’s lines here.

To an extent, it actually feels like a complete break with the past and a full recast – perhaps even with Hines’ Doctor opposite a ‘new’ Jamie – would work better than this halfway house. By the same token, the format feels held back by being a full cast audio, but with narration. The narration is redundant throughout and doesn’t actually add anything to proceedings. Wills’ Narrator, for example, describes our trio looking down a hillside towards some panzer tanks in the snow below, before we move to the cast’s dialogue establishing how they’re on a hillside looking down at some panzer tanks below. Hopefully future releases will cut that Narrator role as its completely unneeded and simply slows down the drama.

Added on top of all this is a doppleganger for Polly, played by a different actor most of the time but sometimes by Wills – meaning that in some scenes Wills is giving voice to three different characters at once. And also that in some scenes the same character is played by two different actors from one line to the next. It’s to the credit of everyone involved that it’s not actually as hard to follow as that makes it sound. I have to admit though that by the end of the two hours, I did get used to the various voices, except possibly for the Doctor himself.

Set into this format is a story perhaps best described as ‘Pure Historical Under Siege.’ The TARDIS lands our heroes in the days of WWII and quickly they become tied to the fate of the isolated base of the ‘Night Witches,’ as the steady advance of the Nazis towards Stalingrad draws ever closer to the base. And, typically of a Base Under Siege story, the base commander is deeply sceptical of the new arrivals before beginning to crack under the pressure and becoming as much a threat to her own people as the enemy at the gates. Indeed, we see very little of the Germans themselves in The Night Witches and the Doctor and his companions spend most of the runtime victims of commander Vasney’s attempts to expose them as German spies and, later on, use their deaths to the advantage of a mad propaganda scheme to demoralize the enemy forces.

This leaves the play a little short of incident, and much of it is pretty predictable. Each cliffhanger focuses of a dramatic revelation clearly signposted as much as an episode and a half before. Everyone’s gasps of shock and disbelief when they see Polly in the first episode, for instance, makes it no surprise when her doppleganger shows up and the theme music kicks in. And with it established early on that not only is Tatiana a dead ringer for Polly, but a talented impressionist and mimic who was about to begin a stage career before the war who is sick of the fighting and desperate to find a way out, it’s easy to see where the plot will go an hour later.

That said, first time contributor to Big Finish Roland Moore delivers a script that has all the right elements in all the right places but, like a piece of Ikea flat pack furniture, there are stress marks where the screwdriver has been applied a little too brutally in the effort to make it all fit together. The real life heroism of the Night Witches, who ran dozens of bombing missions a night in obsolete bi-planes under horrendous conditions is a great period of history to explore and fits nicely with Who’s old fashioned educational remit with lots of detail on the tactics and deployment of the Night Witches. And while there are no genuine Russians among the cast, it’s still lovely to hear some skilled voice work from the Anglo-Polish Wanda Opalinska as Vasney and Lithuanian Kristina Buikaite as Lilya, a young Night Witch smitten with Ben. It lends a nice sense of location to the performances, and of our regular TARDIS team as strangers in a strange land. And it comes wrapped in a cover that, even by Tom Webster's high standards, is a strikingly beautiful composition.

A relatively slight story buoyed by sincere and convincing performances by the guest cast and a compellingly tense corner of history, The Night Witches highlights the unique challenges The Early Adventures present to listeners. It’s not to be forgotten, however, that when it comes to recapturing the brilliance of this era of Doctor Who, The Early Adventures are the only game in town.





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