The merits and flaws of Doctor Who as a stage-play

Updated: Apr 25

Doctor Who may have established itself on television, but it has existed in many forms, from audio dramas, to novels, comic books and even occasionally video games. An overlooked and forgotten medium for Doctor Who storytelling, I think, is stage-plays. There have been a few over the years which ran for a time but haven’t had an overly influential impact on Doctor Who. Big Finish adapted these stories for audio in 2008. I would like to explore the merit of these stories and whether Doctor Who has any future on the stage.

The first of the Doctor Who stage-plays was during the height of Dalekmania in 1965. The Curse of the Daleks is a story that centres around the Daleks and is the only one of the three plays that does not feature the Doctor. At this point in Doctor Who’s history, with the Dr Who and the Daleks Movie with Peter Cushing, it was the Daleks that had made Doctor Who’s success, so this makes a lot of sense within the context of 1960s Dalekmania. It was performed as a matinee show at London Wyndham’s theatre over the Christmas period from 21st December 1965-15th, January 1966. There was talk of the show going on tour, but this never materialised. It is credited to both Terry Nation and David Whitaker, but Dalek creator Terry Nation had very little to do with it. Very little documentation or photos exist of the original production. Luckily, we have Big Finish and Nicholas Briggs to thank for adapting the script back in 2008 which is apparently fairly faithful to the original play.

I do want to acknowledge before I discuss any of the Big Finish adaptations that I am clearly not experiencing these stories in the manner in which they were intended. They were created and forged as stage productions, therefore, my ability to judge the story and its value as a stage production is limited because I can’t watch it in the way it was intended as I am experiencing it in a different medium. However, at least through the audios there is some kind of record of it for fans like myself who weren’t around at the time to experience the story and I can at least judge that. I will try as best as I can to use the sources available to get a sense of what the original production would have been like. The inevitability is that there are some things that won’t translate in the same way and work as they would in a stage production. However, I am hoping the discussion of the concept of Doctor Who as a stage-play will be interesting and I can talk about the specific directions these plays decided to go and the strengths and weaknesses in that.

David Whitaker is probably one of my favourite writers of the original series. As the original Doctor Who story editor and the writer of many brilliant stories such as the Crusade, the Power of the Daleks, the Evil of the Daleks and the Enemy of the World I think he was a really good choice for a Dalek stage-play especially as he made valid contributions in the origins of the Daleks. Judging from the adaptation by Nicholas Briggs, I don’t think the Curse of the Daleks was his best work and could have been a lot better.

The play falls down through the lack of interesting and well-developed characters and personas to contrast one another. This fails to grip the audience, enhance the story, push the conflict forward and keep the audience interested. The Daleks simply aren’t enough to sustain a story. They are the threat, but the best Dalek stories are the ones where you care about the central characters who the Daleks are inflicting terror upon. John Ladiver is an interesting and morally complex character, but he is surrounded by nothing but dull planks of wood. The characters don’t have fleshed out enough motives or moral values to create enough gripping drama or to do anything with the situation it wants you to be invested in. You don’t really care who the traitor of the story is, and the revelation falls flat because there is nothing to the characters to change your perception of them.

The real failing is in the lack of Dalek action. Five new Dalek props were built for the stage production, but the lack of a showcase for them and their cunning intellect and evil is very disappointing. There are some interesting and very hard-hitting political observations across the story. The Dalek War acts as a great vehicle for David Whitaker to express his opinions on fascist extremism post war and the cowardice of people being unwilling to act against it which has a lot of truth. However, what really dates the story is the rampant sexism in it. I can look past dated gender politics, but the Curse of the Daleks is simply atrocious and uncomfortable even by the standards of the time. The way it mocks the feminist movement and the way the women of the story are all treated as objectified desirable conquests makes parts of the story feel very icky. I can see what the Curse of the Daleks was going for and the building blocks are there for something really good. However, given the festive period, the story itself feels ill-suited to its audience and should have had more fun injected into it. It’s a dire and dull slog of a political drama with no lightness to it. The early Dalek stories had a lot of insightful anti-fascist commentary, but Terry Nation had a skill at mixing it in with escapist adventure storytelling and there is none of that in the Curse of the Daleks. The best aspects of the play would be very much remodelled for the Power of the Daleks, which is a far superior story.

The second of the Doctor Who stage-plays was the Seven Keys to Doomsday, which ran for four weeks from the 16th December 1974 at the Adelphi Theatre in London and featured Trevor Martin, who had played one of the Time Lords in the War Games, playing an alternative version of the Fourth Doctor. Doctor Who at this point was at a transition point between eras and production teams. The play had been unable to secure Jon Pertwee to play the Doctor, and Tom Baker was too busy with the filming of Season 12, so Trevor Martin was hired to play the Doctor. However, outgoing script editor Terrance Dicks was secured to write the thing which I think was an enormous strength in the production. Terrance Dicks defined and cultivated the essentials of what we know Doctor Who to be in many ways. Terrance Dicks understood the makeup, bread and butter and basic appeal of the series. The Big Finish adaptation which he also wrote distinctly reflects that. The Seven Keys to Doomsday, whilst being well received critically, was a financial failure largely due to being a product of circumstances. The IRA bombings around London at the time meant audiences and parents were wary of leaving their homes.

Out of the three plays, I think this one is by far the best and the most reflective of what Doctor Who is as a series. The other two have other objectives, but I think the Seven Keys to Doomsday is what I would like to see a future Doctor Who stage-play be. It simply translates the essentials of Doctor Who and the appeal of the series into a stage-show format. It feels like the same series from the television and the tone, feel, writing and adventure creates that same feeling of comfort in the storytelling which pleases the audience it’s aimed at. It’s at its heart an appealing and thrilling Doctor Who story. There seems to be a simplicity in the way that Terrance Dicks just wrote a good story that is loyal to the source material and wrote it to fit the stage. The changes that were made are merely technical rather than changing the spirit of the series itself.

In the audio adaptation, Trevor Martin does return to play the role of the Doctor and does a rather splendid job. I’d describe his Doctor as a strong merge between William Hartnell and Jon Pertwee. He is believable as a headstrong character of intellectual and moral intelligence but has a grumpy and irritable tetchiness to him that I like. You can believe him as an alien in the fact that he has a cold and ruthless harshness in his attitude towards human life which is very morally questionable and at odds with the companions which makes him interesting. However, he is practical and focused on the bigger picture and well personified as a figure of moral good. There is even a kind of regeneration scene at the start from Jon Pertwee to Trevor Martin. Overall, I think Trevor Martin was a solid fit for the professor and adventurer vibe of the character and who the Doctor is. Jenny and Jimmy are the companions of the story originally played by Wendy Padbury, who had previously been Zoe Heriot during the Second Doctor era and James Matthews. In the audio version, Charlie Hays and Joe Thompson play them. You see everything through their eyes as they are thrust into adventure. I liked Jenny as a companion a lot. She is full of adventure, curiosity and compassion and her bravery and guts make her a natural fit for the companion role. Jimmy is a contrast to this and becomes very annoying very quickly. His selfishness and argumentativeness throughout make him unlikeable and a very singularly defined character who barely develops.

The plot of the Seven Keys to Doomsday is very simple. It concerns the Doctor, Jenny and Jimmy trying to track down all the pieces of the Crystal of All Power to stop the Daleks using it for their evil means. The story presents the basics of Doctor Who in its adventure, mystery storytelling and a fight against oppression and evil, and I think the plot is very engaging. The story replicates the Doctor Who formula very well. However, if you are familiar with Doctor Who, especially the original series, then the Seven Keys to Doomsday doesn’t exactly give you anything that you haven’t seen before as it’s a very generic and run-of-the-mill story. I am more forgiving of this than I would usually be because a large amount of the original appeal would be seeing Doctor Who on the stage, seeing the Daleks on stage and the technical brilliance of the production. You can’t replicate that on audio, so part of the appeal is lost, and you are left with the story itself. This does present a weakness in Doctor Who as a stage-play though. The actual story can end up being quite simple and generic as the efforts are put into trying to put the main parts of Doctor Who on stage.

The last of the Doctor Who stage-plays was a touring show between 23rd March-19th August 1989, a musical called the Ultimate Adventure. Terrance Dicks was hired to write it so it was in good hands. This time you had a main Doctor. Jon Pertwee initially took it on until he was taken ill, and understudy David Banks filled in for a few performances before Colin Baker came in and took his place for the rest of the run. It ran all over the place, starting in London and going to Liverpool, Oxford, Edinburgh, Nottingham and Northampton. The Ultimate Adventure is aimed at a much younger audience and is basically a musical pantomime. The plot itself is pretty superfluous and sporadic, mainly as producer Mark Furness had a long list of things he wanted to include which Terrance Dicks then had to make room for in the script. The Anniversary special the Five Doctors largely succeeds by Terrance Dicks' ability to expertly streamline the demands and impossibilities of numerous things to juggle and include into an accessible and fun story that satisfies its audience. I can’t credit the Ultimate Adventure to the same degree. I don’t think as a project it’s nearly as special and the story isn’t nearly as gripping or interesting. However, it could have been a lot worse if handled by a lesser writer. Terrance Dicks, at the very least, makes the story quite simplistic and the same talent is on display in the audio adaptation. The main failure of the Ultimate Adventure is in part its non-existent scattered story. The pantomime tone and feel means you get a version of Doctor Who which isn’t reflective of the TV show. It’s aimed at an audience which I’m sure it appealed to but it feels like you’ve got something that’s been not just morphed for the stage, but forced to fit into the trappings of a genre which Doctor Who wasn’t designed for, and isn’t a natural fit for.

As a result, you don’t get the best of Doctor Who displayed on the stage. The favourable aspects of Doctor Who’s appeal are diluted and lost under the pantomime and musical demands of the Ultimate Adventure. It goes so far in having its own identity that it becomes a different thing entirely from the TV show. It’s not a version of Doctor Who on the stage which I would want to see. I have to admit that I’m not especially fond of, or have much affection for, the musical genre so this story was unlikely to appeal to me. Given the child audience and skill and spectacle of the production, I can also imagine that seeing it in person as a family would be quite a different experience. However, I can’t help but feel that the Ultimate Adventure has fallen victim to everything which should be avoided in a Doctor Who stage production. It’s an absurd and cringey pantomime with aspects of Doctor Who stapled on top. It doesn’t resemble the image and feel of the show.

The musical aspects of the production feel ill judged. I’m not totally against merging the musical genre into Doctor Who, but I think it does need to be handled with thought. The Big Finish story, Doctor Who and the Pirates, gets the balance just right with having a silliness but also having tragic and emotional elements. The music within the Ultimate Adventure does not feel within the spirit of what Doctor Who is and feels thoughtless and illogical. You also have a plot based on contrivances hopping from one place to the other, making the whole story feel like pointless filler with situations and dangers that have no bearing on one another. If you are a 6-year-old you might find the Ultimate Adventure a lot of fun, but beyond that, I don’t think there is a lot of value to it.

The Ultimate Adventure is the play which there is the best record of. Numerous photos and production details still exist, as well as several illegal fan recordings of the play itself. Josh Snares managed to restore these into something vaguely watchable last year. I highly recommend seeking this out and giving it a watch as it’s the best idea we have on the feel of the production itself and what a Doctor Who stage-play is like to experience.

Being around 35 years since the last Doctor Who stage-play the question remains why hasn’t there been one since 1989 and do they have any future? It’s certainly interesting to explore but the biggest reason I think there hasn’t been a stage-play since the shows relaunch in 2005 is that, as standards and expectations of science fiction go up, it becomes more difficult to replicate that on stage. When the original series was being made, there were more similarities between TV and theatre and now, there are far more similarities between TV and film. The stage-play in some ways lends itself very well to the style and feel of Classic Who. The methodical progression of things is very similar in pace and feel. Early 1960s stories like the Aztecs and the Massacre aren’t dissimilar to that of a stage-play. The Seven Keys to Doomsday and the Ultimate Adventure also keenly take advantage of the cliff-hanger format of Doctor Who, which is the ideal place for an interval. The problems and shortcomings often come in the commercial angle of Doctor Who as a stage-play and who it’s trying to appeal to. The stories of these plays can end up being quite basic, with not an awful lot of meat and substance. This is simply a victim of being more focused on spectacle and visual imagery. The focus of these plays is often more about seeing the Tardis and the Daleks on stage, and the spectacle of that, rather than the adventure of the story itself, which is rather limiting.

That being said, I still think there is great promise in the idea of a Doctor Who stage-play. The footage that exists of the Ultimate Adventure shows how easily innovative lighting effects and convincing costumes are able to immerse you in the world of Doctor Who. With the innovation and achievement of a project like Time Fracture, I think it is possible to create a convincing and impressive Doctor Who production. The Seven Keys to Doomsday provides the best starting point as to what a Doctor Who play should be. It simply needs to capture the essence of the show and fit it into a stage-play. It doesn’t need to try to capture the scale and scope of the series. Doctor Who is known for its isolated scare factor and the stage is the place for a slow paced and suspenseful story. An actor who has previously played the Doctor might also be up for reprising the role in the form of a stage-play. It would offer a different opportunity and challenge for them and be enticing for audiences.

Looking at the Seven Keys to Doomsday, one of the most intriguing parts of it is a Doctor who is exclusive to the stage. I’m sure there are many accomplished actors who wouldn’t want the commitment of playing the Doctor on television but would treasure the opportunity to play the role on the stage and have a chance to do their spin on it. There would be a joy and appeal to seeing a very successful Shakespearean stage actor as the Doctor. The most unlikely but the most ideal stage-play for me would be one with the Doctor of the time in between series. An isolated offscreen adventure that also ties neatly into the TV show would be a brilliant idea. A wonderful way to bridge the gap between series and to see the Doctor in an adventure in a slightly different way. The challenge and difficulty of this will always be scheduling. However, I can see the magic in my mind of Ncuti Gatwa’s energy as the Doctor on stage and it’s something I would love to see.