If you happen to be in Sydney, Australia, and feel the need to catch up on your Doctor Who watching, there’s a golden opportunity coming up. Comedian Patrick “Doublethreat” Magee has crafted a show called “Every Episode of Doctor Who Ever Live on Stage,” which is just what it sounds like.
Needless to say, covering the whole of Doctor Who in just one hour is a pretty ambitious undertaking — people have done similar things for Star Wars, Harry Potter and Shakespeare, but this is the Doctor we’re talking about here. Writes Magee:
I’m doing this show with the help of three other performers – my brother Ciaran, a young man called Nicholas Pond and a young lady called Rubee Sookee, who has never seen an episode of Doctor Who and has a distressing habit of calling the Ninth Doctor “Roy Eccleston”. Rehearsals are fun, they’re always marvellous fun; we don’t have to think about normal things, we’re saving the universe.
But oh lordy, despite my love of all things Who, writing this show has been like birthing a fully-grown Judoon. How do you condense fifty years and seven hundred and ninety eight episodes into an hour? By my calculations, that works out to four and a half seconds per episode – will the audience accept a four-and-a-half second snatch of Episode Five of The Sensorites if it means they have to miss out on the whole of the Pandorica speech?
So we’ve had to be clever. Very clever. Almost indescribably clever. For example, we’re doing the Pertwee era as the Brigadier trying to justify his increasingly ridiculous expenses to the MoD. Our Sixth Doctor is an excessively violent football player with a tendency to push opposing team-members into conveniently placed acid baths. Tom Baker is… well. You’ll have to come and see the show, won’t you?
The show opens this Wednesday. Buy tickets here.
