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TARDIS Guide

Overview

Released

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Written by

Lisa McMullin

Runtime

60 minutes

Time Travel

Past

Location (Potential Spoilers!)

France

Synopsis

Someone or something is manipulating the dreams of French playwright Antonin Artaud. As Artaud's nightmares are made manifest, the Doctor is compelled to intervene. Otherwise, Artaud’s new idea for an immersive theatre could become a ticket to literally die for.

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2 reviews

This wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.  A Theatre of Cruelty sees the Doctor confronted with the impossible - somebody knocking on the TARDIS door while it is in mid-flight.  The takes the Doctor to Antonin Artaud, a french playwright struggling with nightmares.  The Doctor goes on to visit and explore Artaud's dreams, investigating how Beatrice Cenci, a women who tragically died years ago, seems to be haunting Artaud.

As far as stories go, in a lot of ways it is a pretty simple ghost story, but the dream angle adds a lot of flavour to A Theatre of Cruelty.  So many scenes and sequences really have that sort of logic you only get in dreams - continuity and logic go out the window in such situations, but writer Lisa McMullin manages to give us enough of a concrete sense of rules and grounded scenes that it never felt like we had one foot completely out of reality.  A good story needs rules.  If anything can happen to characters at any time (like in a dream) - the stakes feel elusive and it's hard to get invested.  That never really happened to me with A Theatre of Cruelty, which I found impressive on the whole.


dema1020

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I really struggled with this story mainly because I hated learning about the theatre of cruelty when I was in college so there’s that sort of disconnect there I also struggled with following the story too sadly


Rock_Angel

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