Beautiful Things (audio story)

Jago, Leela and Ellie take a trip to the theatre to see Oscar Wilde's new play and discover something sinister during the interval. Meanwhile, bodies are turning up at Litefoot’s lab, while Wilde meets his biggest fan...

Cast

References

Leela tells Jago and Litefoot that the flash of her blade is enough to fend off the advances of the builders in Litefoot's house. As her room is uninhabitable, she has taken to sleeping in one of the flower beds in Litefoot's garden.
Professor Claudius Dark claims that his enemies have found a way to him through Jago and Litefoot and he sent them to Brighton for their own protection. Being aware of their harrowing experiences while there, he suggests that he take them to see the Irish author and playwright Oscar Wilde's new play A Woman of No Importance at the Haymarket Theatre. Litefoot finds it suspicious that Professor Dark has been able to procure tickets to the play at such short notice.
Having previously met Wilde, Litefoot claims that he was not enamoured with him due to his egotistical behaviour. He describes Wilde's work as being about "terribly grand people being terribly witty about things that mean terribly little."
Leela claims that she would have stabbed Lord Illingworth, one of the characters in the play, through the heart for his actions.
While Jago and Litefoot were in Brighton, several young men, all artists and writers, were found alive but displaying only the barest signs of life. They were all brain dead and died within several days. All of these men were found standing up, staring into space with dead eyes. Sgt. Quick tells Litefoot that all of them lied about their intended destination when they were last seen in a normal state. One victim was a poet named Ambrose Hutchinson, who died shortly after Litefoot examined him. He claimed that he was going to visit his mother, who had in actuality died years earlier. Litefoot believes that their consciousnesses have been stolen.
Leela states that Warren Gadd has no scent of any kind.
Jago mistakes Widowers' Houses for one of Wilde's plays. As Wilde informs him, it was actually written by his fellow Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.
Litefoot believes that Gadd has stolen the consciousnesses of the artists so as to halt the ageing process. On investigating his house, Litefoot and Sgt. Quick discover that he has an avatar who shows significant signs of ageing and infirmity. Litefoot compares this situation to Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He is surprised that Jago has not read the book, considering that even Sgt. Quick has done so. In his defence, Jago tells him that he is "more of a Dickens man" and that he was "beside [himself] when Little Nell died," referring to the heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop. Upon investigation, Jago discovers that Gadd was born in 1851 and that his parents died in the same manner as the artists.
Gadd is aware that Wilde is keeping a terrible secret from his wife Constance. He comments that he observed him in the company of Lord Alfred Douglas at the party in Somerset House.
A lover of art who places beauty over everything else, Gadd created his infinite library using the power of his mind as a child. It contains every book and song that could possibly be written and every work of art that could ever be created. He claims that it is a conceptual space rather than an actual one.
Litefoot determines that the elderly and infirm Gadd is the real one and the young Gadd the avatar, the exact opposite of the situation in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Litefoot expresses the hope that homosexuals such as Wilde and Gadd's victims shall be able to practice their love freely in a more enlightened time in the future.
Mr Kempston and Mr Hardwick directed Gadd to make Wilde his next victim, hoping that the temporal paradox caused by Wilde's death in the 1890s would attract Professor Dark's attention and force him to come out of the shadows. However, Jago, Litefoot, Leela and Wilde were able to resolve the situation without Dark's assistance.

Story notes

Alan Cox (Oscar Wilde) previously played John Matthews in AUDIO: The Roof of the World and Mark Seven in AUDIO: The Destroyers.
John Sackville (Warren Gadd) previously played Polly Wright's uncle Randolph Wright and a Nazi spy who impersonated him in AUDIO: Resistance.
Although the overall series is never given a date more specific than the 1890s, Oscar Wilde's play A Woman of No Importance premiered on 19 April 1893 whereas George Bernard Shaw's play Widowers' Houses premiered on 9 December 1892 in real life. Litefoot, referring to "the love that dares not speak its name", quotes the poem Two Loves, originally published in 1894.

Continuity

Litefoot's house is still being repaired. (AUDIO: Chronoclasm, AUDIO: Jago in Love)
Jago and Leela discuss the former's brief relationship with Abigail Woburn during their trip to Brighton. (AUDIO: Jago in Love) Leela tells him that she knows how it feels to lose someone. (AUDIO: Insurgency)
Per Professor Claudius Dark's instructions, Leela suggested that she, Jago and Litefoot have a holiday in Brighton. (AUDIO: Jago in Love)
Litefoot has previously met Wilde. Following the appearance of metal spheres from the future in 1890s London, the Metropolitan Police Service issued the cover story that they were a stunt by a group by Bohemian artists. When Litefoot raised the possibility that this may, in fact, be the case, Sergeant Quick told him that the police had interviewed Wilde to that end and were confident that he had nothing to do with it. (AUDIO: Chronoclasm)
After watching the first half of A Woman of No Importance, Leela thanks Xoanon as she initially believes that the play is over. She tells Jago and Ellie that she would have stabbed herself with a janis thorn if she had had one to hand. (TV: The Face of Evil)
The Sixth Doctor had previously claimed to have attended the premiere of Wilde's subsequent play The Importance of Being Earnest. (AUDIO: Assassin in the Limelight)

External links

Official Beautiful Things - Series Four Box Set page at bigfinish.com