The Curse of the Daleks (stage play)
The Curse of the Daleks was the first stage play to be based upon elements of Doctor Who and the second production to take place within the Doctor Who universe which didn't actually feature the Doctor after TV: Mission to the Unknown.
Overview
The Curse of the Daleks came to London's Wyndham's Theatre at the height of "Dalekmania" in the UK. It had a month-long run from 21 December 1965 to 15 January 1966 as a matinee show. Afterwards, the production was not remounted to go on tour and has never been performed since.
Plot
“When fears are abating/ Don’t try to forget them/The Daleks are waiting/Quietly planning and /Scheming and hating/Remember!”... In the bare, "curved ribbed storehold’ of the spaceship Starfinder, are two prisoners. Harry Sline is under arrest for slave trading between Mars and Venus, and he’s looking at a 30-year prison sentence in The Deeps underwater prison in the Atlantic... Disgraced Commander John Ladiver’s many crimes include illegal sales of uranium to ‘the wrong people’, an act that almost led to a space war... He’s suspected of having ‘cached away about 30 million.’ Ladiver is facing execution. Both have just done eight days in a holding cell on Satellite Prison, and Sline is trying to file through the handcuffs chaining the pair together... Food is brought by radio-pic (A primitive ‘radio-picture’ communications device) operator and engineer Bob Slater, who’s armed with a “short stubbly” detonator handgun... Captain Steven Redway looks in on the prisoners...
The Starfinder, travelling at light speed, runs into trouble as it hits a meteor storm, resulting in ‘programme circuits shorting.’ The ‘small and wiry’ Co-pilot Rocket Smith (‘Rock’ to his friends) enters to inform the Captain that there’s smoke coming out of the radio-pic set. Somebody sabotaged it by throwing iron filings in it. Forced to land to make repairs, the crew choose the relatively quiet nearby planet of Skaro, even though the Unispace Police have declared Skaro ‘out of bounds... The human crew are dimly aware that the hot planet Skaro is the home of the now deactivated Daleks and the beautiful blonde “wandering” race of Thals. The aloof ‘Little Miss Iceberg’ Marion Clements who is dark, attractive, and businesslike in her smart white lab technician’s costume, enters with her boss, the handsome and dignified fiftysomething Professor Vanderlyn. The prisoners are disembarked, still manacled together, along with Vanderlyn’s equipment, including refrigerated crates of biological specimens from around the universe, wheeled in on a trolley to keep them out of the oven-like heat on board the Starfinder.
In a courtyard in the dead City of the Daleks on Skaro, there are many archways and ramps and secret doors... There’s also a dormant Dalek standing in the courtyard, overgrown with vines and with its eyestalk and its suction pad arm pointing at the ground... Vanderlyn relates how the humans managed to switch off the Daleks power at the end of the Dalek war, and embraces the Skaro landing as an “opportunity to make notes, aha!” Rocket hangs his jacket over the Dalek’s eyestalk. Vanderlyn and Marion pull the creepers off the Dalek to examine it, with Captain Redway attempting to flirt with Marion... Vanderlyn thereafter starts to unload his specimen cases from the trolley and finds there is one that he doesn’t recognise - a large case with VENDERLYN written on it, that contains a dozen thick black discs. It has a smooth bright metal base, metal without joins, in two sections with “some kind of barely visible pin sticking out of a hole in the base.” Before long, Rocket notices one of discs is missing... Seconds later it turns up stuck to the side of the overgrown Dalek, whose eyestalk twitches into life! “Slowly, its sucker stick starts to straighten up.” and it moves around and exits through the ramp. The mystery black boxes turn out to be “flooding power into the Dalek like a blood transfusion,” and at the same time, whispering recorded orders to the Daleks as well... It is suggested that “We could simply whistle up the space boys and that would be that” [The "Space boys refers to either the Unispace Security Forces or the SSS, or to give it its full title the Space Securirity Service].
Captain Redway takes command of the situation, while Vanderlyn talks about electricity and indeed static electricity. Sline eventually manages to file through his manacles, and is felled by an anaesthetic bullet as he attempts to make a break for it. Three Daleks appear trundling down the ramp with a trolley on which is Vanderlyn’s crate, a crate that now contains the slumped body of Bob Slater... The black boxes meanwhile are gone... In the Scanner room inside the City. “Black claw-equipped Daleks” are powering themselves up and plugging in a huge screen on which they have the humans under surveillance. A disembodied voice, [Who is called TANNOY DALEK in the script], commands: “All-Daleks-not-on-patrol-duties-to-return -to-their-panels!” Redway goes missing with the only detonator gun, leaving Rocket Smith in charge... It turns out that Slater was not killed by Daleks, but poisoned by a hypodermic... The humans send up a flare to bring in the Thals, who reply by flashing a piece of polished metal.
An explosion then heralds the appearance of the dignified, white haired Thal leader Dexion and his daughter Ijayna as they seal passages behind them. “Close the arches!” barks Ijayna. “It’s no good being afraid of them...” The Thals are a low-tech wandering race, but no longer the pacifist race they once were. They are graceful, attractive and their clothes are designed to suit the hot Skaroan climate... “You are badly prepared!” comments Ijayna, to which Dexion replies; “You must make allowances. These people have not lived in the shadow of the Daleks as we have.“ The “fair, tall and beautiful” female Thal “Ijayna wears a skirt, and a thin silver band around her forehead which encloses the top of her hair, alongside a sleeved top fixed at the wrists with silver cuffs. These Thals and Commander Ladiver have met before, however Ladiver led the regular five-yearly patrol of local star system three years before, and investigated Ijayna’s claim that someone had landed secretly on Skaro just before Ladiver’s last visit - possibly, as they now believe, to test the black boxes. Ladiver’s reports were ignored, and his subsequent uranium-smuggling career was a cover for routine flights across “the Skaro universe.”
Ijayana and Ladiver become engaged to be married and the Thals set Ladiver free. Dexion refers to “my people waiting in the dead [vitrified] forest”... A badly-wounded Redway stumbles in, and the [Tannoy] Dalek orders the humans to “Obey-the-Da-leks!” and hand over their radio... Someone is controlling the Daleks and they have plans to “rule the universe from Skaro.” Night is falling when a torch-equipped Dalek appears through a secret door. They exterminate Sline when he runs for it... The Daleks round up the women saying, “The two females are to be given food and drink and also water in containers and pieces of fibre cloth. I shall order it! …Our master has ordered that we begin to prepare for the invasion of the planet earth!” It begins to look as if whoever’s running the Daleks is probably male, and suspicion falls on Vanderlyn or Rocket Smith... Meanwhile, in the Control room, [which is the “redressed” courtyard set made to look like it’s underground] there are panels with switches and dials either side, glowing bulbs, and recorded tape spools spinning...
There’s a whole array of tripods and rostrums, bars and looped cables and six-pin electrical sockets with ‘holes in it, the size of a telephone dial.’ The male prisoners are drugged and propped up on a bench, whilst the ladies are “secured to floor by magnets...” They discover that the killer and that of the Daleks master, is none other than Bob Slater, who wasn't really dead... He’d just injected something to freeze his heart... He put the detonator guns out of action... And he went off to see the Thals and smash their radio... He is by now quite insane!, saying, “I’ll show you how mad I am! Daleks, we will connect the power!”... He rants on about how the Daleks obey him, and how the two girls are going to be his playthings when he rules “all the universes". Ladiver then attempts to thwart the Dalek power-up by clinging to the underside of a trolley full of power cells that is pushed by another Dalek... However, the Daleks do momentarily manage to get full power, which leads to their black boxes falling off, which in turn frees them from Bob Slater’s hair-brained scheme, immediately turning on Slater, saying, “You-are-no-longer-our-mas-ter!!" and inevitably they exterminate him.
Ladiver has meanwhile been continuing to pull the power cells out of their sockets, and messing with the Daleks electrical engineering, starts to power them back down again... The Black Dalek begs the humans to “Turn on our power… again” As he shuts down, Black Dalek warns, “Tell your people on earth……that the Daleks are waiting … One day… we will… rise again… one day…” Lavider corrects the Dalek by concluding, “Tell them the Daleks are finished.” “Are they?” replies Rocket, “Marvellous!...” The curtain falls with Ladiver and Ijanya kissing.
Cast
- Captain of the Starfinder
- The co-pilot, nicknamed "Rock".
- communications engineer
- has refrigerated samples of biological specimens from many planets
- Vanderlyn's assistant
- former Commander, convict arrested for uranium smuggling; has been to Skaro before and knows the Thals
- convict arrested for slave-trading
- leader of the Thals
- Dexion's daughter, is engaged to Ladiver
- The Daleks - uncredited
- depowered at the time of the Starfinder's landing
- led by a Black Dalek
Crew
- Producers - John Gale and Ernest Hecht
- Director - Gillian Howell
- Licensee and Managing Director - Donald Akbery
- Designer - Hutchinson Scott
References
- Unispace Police have declared Skaro off-limits.
- Every five years, the local stars are patrolled.
- The Deeps is a prison located in the Atlantic Ocean.
- Paris and London were destroyed during the war.
Notes
- The script for the play is currently filed in the British Library in the Manuscript Collection as Play no 1965/50, Lord Chamberlain's Licence No. 356, November 1965.
- The writing of the play is credited to both David Whitaker and Terry Nation, although Nation actually had very little to do with it.
- An advert appeared in The Stage newspaper in October 1966, in which John Gale Productions announced that they were putting their entire stage production of The Curse of the Daleks, including the Daleks, up for sale. The Dalek props, however, did not get sold - they were recycled for Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D..
- The frequently used title device "... of the Daleks" did not originate with this story. That honour actually goes to the comic story Invasion of the Daleks.
- David Whitaker credits this story as coming from one of the Dalek Chronicles.
- Five Dalek props were used, one painted as a Black Dalek.
- The "Dalek December" rhyme is a reworking of "Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November".
- The Power of the Daleks would again feature the idea of depowered Daleks.
- An official audio adaptation was released by Big Finish Productions in November 2008.
Remakes
- Main article: The Curse of the Daleks (audio story)
- In April 2008, Altered Vistas released their computer-generated fan-production of The Curse of the Daleks (AV16). It was later withdrawn on announcement of an official release.
- In November 2008, a new production of the play was mounted for CD release by Big Finish Productions as Doctor Who: The Stageplays - The Curse of the Daleks.
External links
- Live From Mars - Curse of the Daleks
- Altered Vistas - Curse of the Daleks (a withdrawn fan-production)
- Dalek 6388 - A Dalek Prop History - Curse of the Daleks Stage Play
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