Doctor Who review: Jago & Litefoot face a world of fantasy and nightmares in The Theatre of Dreams
By James Aggas
The Theatre of Dreams isn’t just an extremely strange adventure for Jago & Litefoot. It’s also a perfect example of the Doctor Who spin-off at its best.
The Theatre of Dreams is a classic example of what made Jago & Litefoot such a brilliant audio spin-off. The series often featured elements that made the pairing’s original TV appearance so successful, and yet in some ways, it also told stories that its parent series wouldn’t explore. Stories that were so strange and so out there, even for Doctor Who. The Theatre of Dreams is exactly one of those stories.
The Theatre of Dreams begins with Jago finding an unusual act. One that promises to make your wildest dreams come true. At first, it seems to be a huge success. But then the bodies start showing up…
Initially, this comes across as your basic Jago & Litefoot episode. In fact, there are clear echoes of their original appearance in Doctor Who, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, particularly with an act of Jago’s being directly responsible for horrific murders around London. In some ways, it almost wrongfoots the listener with how typical it comes across. But then we get to the second half, where things get really crazy…
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Dreams and nightmares
The second half of the story is very heavily focused on fantasy and dreams, mainly by showing what the titular theatre of the story is really capable of.
More than that, however – it’s delightfully meta. It plays with storytelling expectations and conventions, and writer Jonathan Morris gets to have some real fun – both with our characters and at their expense, too. It explores ideas that the series wouldn’t usually explore, but does it in the best possible way.
The story is resolved rather neatly, once again, in a rather meta fashion. Even better is that Morris reminds the listener of Jago’s strengths. It’s very easy to imagine Litefoot as the brains of the operation while Jago is more of the comic relief, but both characters are far more complex than that, each having their own mix of strengths and flaws. Having Jago central to the villains’ defeat is rather fitting for a story focused around the theatre.
Overall, The Theatre of Dreams stands out as a fantastic episode from this series. It’s wonderfully imaginative and captures the macabre spirit of Jago & Litefoot delightfully well. Another strong episode that highlights how confident the spin-off was already, at just two series in. And that confidence would only grow over time…
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Do you enjoy stories that play with theatre or dreams? If you’ve listened to The Theatre of Dreams already, is it one of your favorites? Let us know in the comments below.