With a title as on-the-nose as Professor Where and a stage that has a telephone box as its most prominent prop, there’s no disguising that this is a parody of Doctor Who and the many tropes it has generated over the course of its extended broadcast history.
There’s a ‘show within a show’ element, as we’re shown an increasingly desperate and frantic writer’s room, charged with writing the ‘final season’ of the titular show. From specific moments in the dialogue, it’s clear that the creative team behind this production believe that they’re pastiching the Moffatt era of Who, but in a perhaps revealing insight into how cyclical these things can be, it’s more than possible to read that the overly stressed showrunner is a John Nathan-Turner homage.
It’s not entirely clear when we are in terms of the framing device of the show’s writers’ room, which at least fits the theme of travelling through time and space but perhaps needs strengthening in a future iteration of this production. To confuse matters further, just as you’re developing an understanding of the premise, the cast suddenly bursts into song as this is also a musical!
Whilst the performance space is the relatively small Theatre 2 at The Space at Surgeon’s Hall, and there are obvious budgetary restrictions in play, the production has opted not to use microphones during the songs, meaning it can be quite difficult to hear the lyrics over the music. Again, this is an issue that can be resolved with the application of a greater budget, but we recognise the difficulties of developing theatre in the current arts funding climate, especially in trying to develop a musical that’s also a science fiction story.
There’s a lot of heart here and an obvious love of the source material. There’s also an understanding that the British poke fun at those cultural texts they love, and that’s reflected in the acronyms and wordplay, which repeatedly demonstrate that affection.
We think this production is currently a project in development, and as such, there are still some decisions to be made about tone and style, and even, to an extent, the story being told. If the writers of this piece intend to stage it again, then they need to decide how ‘fictional‘ the entire production is going to be. Given the longevity and breadth of the source material, there are more than enough behind-the-scenes stories to be extrapolated from and a tale woven around. At the moment, other than ‘let’s do the final season right here!’, there’s not much in the way of a considered narrative – the stakes need to be higher if we’re going to care.
Alternatively, the entire endeavour requires much greater fictionalisation, including in the names given to the enemies The Professor must defeat; an enemy with a name similar to ‘Daleks’ is a useful shorthand for the level of fear we’re supposed to feel, but is perhaps too close to the original.
There’s a good premise here – and writing a musical is a task that takes considerable time to come to fruition. Once those needed decisions about story, fictionalisation, and overall tone have been made, good progress should be able to be made. We’d be very intrigued to see a future version once the inevitable lessons learned from performing the show in this short run have had time to be considered and applied.
We wish Technobabble Productions all the best as they continue to develop this work, which we hope is able to return at a future stage in its development.
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