July 03, 2011

Swan Song (2011)

After being slightly disappointed with The Man at the End of the Garden, I was hoping that this story would be a return to form. Written by John Dorney, there is a sense that the writer might have been inspired by Black Swan (the Oscar nominated film). None the less, this story is a return to form for the series. The story starts off with the story of Alice who tells us of a tragic event which resulted in her paralysis, robbing her a chance of appearing in a production of Swan Lake. It’s a really sad way of starting of a story but it helps establish the Alice character.

The story takes place between two time periods. The first being in the 1890’s where Jago, Litefoot and Leela are wondering around the Theatre and the other being some time in the future where on the site of the theatre they are doing experiments. It’s due to these experiments that are creating these situations where the two time zones meet up. It’s good when we learn that the future stuff is taking place in the exact same area where the theatre once stood and what happened to the theatre. The story spends just about the right amount of time trying to figure out what was going on before they got to the main action which was trying to stop all hell breaking loose. I like it how they placed in the story in the just the one area. Ok its in two different time zones but they didn’t set it in the Tavern then the theatre then Litefoot’s residence, just in the theatre which meant that I could focus on the story as opposed to where the characters were which is always a bonus for me.

I really like the music for Swan Lake and one of the things that I really like about this story is that they play the music. I know its not the same one as they use in the opera (probably for rights reasons) but the thing about the music is that its so good that it can be played in any way and it would still sound good. Kudos to whoever put it in the story because for me it would have not been as good if they had left it out.

All the regulars are on good form with Louise Jameson getting a lot more to do than she did in the previous story. However it’s the supporting cast that really impressed me with Abigal Hollick leading the way as Alice. Her story was made all the more heartbreaking with Hollick’s performance. Hywel Morgan & Andrew Westfield (Dan and Steven respectively) also did well in supporting Hollick.

Swan Song is a very good story as it was intriguing without being baffling. There is a line about how they didn’t get to do Swan Lake until after Jago had died. It seems that Jago fell in love with the story. John Dorney has written a story with great characters and a story that doesn’t feel rushed and feels like everything was meant to be there as opposed to being thrown in to make the story last the time it needed to run. I still think that the first story is the best so far but this is a fitting second.

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