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Landing on the edge of a cliff in what appears to be ancient
Greece, the Doctor and Lucie interrupt a pair of star-crossed
lovers, Kalkin and Sararti, who have fled their censorious
"parents" and plan to take their own lives. Lucie is rather
pleased, since this romantic angst is just the kind of problem
she feels she excels at solving (thereby giving her one up
on the Doctor, for once). However, the deeper she delves,
the stranger things look. Greek gods with helicopters and
walkie-talkies? What's really going on? And will overlord
Zeus stop at nothing to extend the lives of his chosen few...?
This
audio drama manages to feel fresh and familiar at the same
time.
The familiarity comes from the elements of Jonathan Clements's
plot. The Doctor has met a being claiming to be Zeus before
now, in the Fourth Doctor Doctor Who Monthly comic
strip The Life Bringer. And he encountered immoral
and immortal overlords at roughly the same time on television
in State of Decay.
However,
the writer's primary sources are Roger Zelazny's 1967 novel
Lord of Light and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
His script plainly acknowledges these influences. Like Lord
of Light, this story has people masquerading as deities,
using advanced technology to create the illusion of godlike
powers and to facilitate their "immortality" by transferring
minds into newly grown bodies. Like Zelazny, Clements names
one of his protagonists Kalkin (Anthony Spargo). And lest
we overlook any of the similarities that exist between Kalkin
and Sararti (Jennifer Higham) and Shakespeare's famous star-crossed
lovers, Lucie (Sheridan Smith) helpfully informs us that things
have, "Gone all Romeo and Juliet."
The
freshness comes from the quality of the performances and the
dialogue. Leading the guest cast in every sense is Ian McNeice
as Zeus, a role not unlike that of Baron Harkonnen, whom he
played in the Dune
mini-series and its sequel Children
of Dune. He is quite delightful as the openly
gluttonous and lecherous would-be god. His wife Hera (played
by Elspet Gray, who previously appeared in Doctor Who
in Arc of Infinity, but who is probably best known
as Edmund's mother in The Black Adder) is more sympathetic,
as we hear her tiring of endless existence. Meanwhile, Spargo
and Higham more than hold their own as younger incarnations
of these characters - though the youngest member of the cast,
Paul McGann's own offspring Jake, playing Ganymede, shows
signs of his inexperience.
The whole production crackles with memorable lines such as
Zeus's, "He's my heir and my spare", and Lucie's, "Portal
of cleansing? Portal of perving, more like!"
Despite the technological explanations for the rulers' powers,
Immortal Beloved retains a mythic quality, possibly
owing to the fact that the writer never specifies whether
these people are aliens or humans on some future colony planet.
Or could the TARDIS actually have landed in ancient Greece?
The interviews at the end of the CD are more light-hearted
than enlightening, consisting mostly of the guest actors'
thoughts on the old, new and audio versions of Doctor Who.
The merits of the various Doctors are compared and contrasted,
though sadly no one can seem to think of much to say about
McGann apart from agreeing that he's "lovely". Ian McNeice
has a rather quaint notion of how wealthy Colin Baker's fame
must have made him!
This story might not go down in Who history as an immortal
classic, but there's much about it to make it beloved.
Richard
McGinlay
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