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.

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