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Asylum

1ST JULY 2009

(45-MINUTE EPISODE)

It’s been almost a year since the last Torchwood episode, Joseph Lidster’s audio drama Lost Souls, which also aired as one of BBC Radio 4’s Afternoon Plays. Happily though, we’ve gone from a dearth of new Torchwood to a positive flood of it – three brand new audio plays and a five-part televised mini-series, all within the space of ten days!

The first of the new stories to be aired, Asylum, is certainly a remarkable piece, though it

is admittedly far from what I expected. I was particularly struck by the limited roles given to both John Barrowman and Gareth David-Lloyd; especially so, in fact, given the dramatically reduced size of the Torchwood team post-Exit Wounds and also that Jack and Ianto are the two characters that appear on all of Paul Hocking’s promotional artwork!

This play is, for all intents and purposes, a relatively gentle three-hander between Eve Myles’ Gwen Cooper, Erin Richards’ Freda and, of course, Tom Price’s loveably luckless PC Andy Davison (more commonly known as plain old ‘PC Andy’!) It mirrors the television episode Adrift in many ways; particularly as regards how PC Andy stumbles upon an unusual case and calls in his old colleague and unrequited love Gwen to assist him with the investigation. Even the manner in which Anita Sullivan’s plot gradually unfurls mirrors the pace and style of Adrift, although this time, instead of discovering the scarred victims of the Rift, Gwen finds something perhaps even more disturbing.

“It’s like she’s from here, but a different here.”

Having arrested a young woman named Freda for ‘armed’ robbery, Andy calls in Gwen to take a look at the unusual ‘weapon’ that she pulled on a shopkeeper. Gwen’s investigations reveal that Freda’s ‘weapon’ is no more than a futuristic type of remote control / debit card machine, though Freda herself is something of a larger mystery. Not only does she hail from sixty years in Cardiff’s future, but she is not quite human…

Richards gives a brilliant performance of this young woman out of time; her “strange mix

of English and Scandinavian, but with a Cardiff accent” is certainly something to be heard, though I did find that it bordered a little too much on Vicky Pollard territory for my liking. Still,

I suppose that was the whole idea.

“Don’t let ‘em out there’s a ghostie about, gagging for gore!”

What fascinates me about this story though is what Freda represents; what she means to Torchwood. The notion that Torchwood’s present day (literally; this play is explicitly set in 2009, presumably shortly after the Doctor Who episode Journey’s End) actions might in some way lead to a future of xenophobia and racial intolerance is a very sobering thought; one that in my mind is every bit as dark and every bit as powerful as Jack locking away the disturbed victims of the Rift.

What really sets Asylum apart from Adrift though is that here PC Andy refuses to be cut out of the loop; instead of simply passing the case over to Torchwood, Andy insists on actively assisting Gwen with its running, in the process learning all about the Rift and aliens and even time travel…

“Keep that pet bobby of yours on a leash. Don’t make me retcon him!”

The results range from humorous to heartbreaking. It is hugely entertaining to hear PC Andy effectively step into the shoes of Owen and Toshiko and see the blunders that he makes, as well as the surprising success that he enjoys. Jack in particular seems to warm to him over the course of the episode; matters progress from Andy refusing to let Jack take custody of Freda because he has not been CRB-checked, to Andy driving the whole Torchwood team around on an “overt” mission. I certainly hope that PC Andy is given more exposure like this in the future, whether it via radio-exclusive stories such as this one or perhaps even in the television series.

On a final note, once again I have to applaud the standards of the production. Whilst Lost Souls marked a seamless transition from the visceral world of television to the more much intimate world of sound, it was set in Switzerland, and as such neatly avoided too many express companions with the heavily Cardiff-based television series. Here though, director Kate McAll does a marvellous job of capturing the feel and the local colour of the television series. I’m not sure whether it is the wholly apposite incidental music, Nigel Lewis’ evocative sound design, or perhaps even the fusion of both; but whatever it is, it works.

Overall then, I found Asylum to be a refreshing and captivating story. The performances – particularly those of Myles and Price – are absolutely fantastic, the standard of the whole production is superb, and the story itself satiated with a lot of heart, and a lot of humour.

More of the same please.

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2009

E.G. Wolverson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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