With demons on the loose and dons bursting into flames, Queen Victoria visits Cambridge on the eve of a historic vote that could change the university forever. She finds the city a den of suspicion and devil worship. A force from beyond reality is hunting down the university’s leading academics. Her Majesty enlists the help of a gifted young mathematician to save not just the university, but the universe itself.

In 1897, a vote was taken on whether to grant female students the right to a full degree. It was voted down and despite this, to celebrate it, or perhaps simply because they had nowhere to put the contempt that it sometimes seems drives the upper classes of this country, students burnt effigies of female students.

This is true. If all’s gone well there’s a link including photos at the bottom of this review. It’s also the basis of this, arguably the strongest entry in some time to Big Finish’s most consistently great series.

Doctor Una McCormack’s precise, funny, furious and ultimately vindicative story has Rowena Cooper’s Queen Victoria arrive in town to investigate odd events. She’s also there on royal business of course and is ‘aided’ by Sir James, played by Jon Glover. For the first half of the story, he felt obstructive, annoying, a pantomime don. At one point he even yells at the Queen for stepping on the grass. It’s absurd and annoying and at that halfway point you realize something.

That’s the point.

Glover’s excellent work here is embodying not only a character but an institution in all its calcified and fading glory. Sir James is a dangerous irrelevance and one who’s not had the common decency to fade into obscurity. The combustion epidemic sweeping the city’s Dons looks set to change that.

Sir James provides the context but the friendship, and antagonism, at the heart of the story is all Cooper and Jade Gordon as Onora Tapley. Cooper’s Queen Victoria is whimsical and arch, a woman greatly enjoying the chance to misbehave her age, experience, position and secret knowledge give her. She isn’t just enjoying her privilege she’s living inside it and isn’t especially minded to change that.

The logical choice for a story like this is for her to be changed by her clash with Onora. The smart, fun, weird, interesting choice is the one McCormack takes. The Queen and Onora get on, instantly, bonding over the idiot they have to tolerate together. Gordon and Cooper are wonderful together, sparky and playful and conspiratorial until the battle lines are drawn. Then the story makes its most successful choices. The Queen is the Queen, restricted by the very privilege that from Onora’s perspective supports the establishment she despises. One wants change, the other embodies tradition, and instead of just conflict McCormack shows us respect, friendship and understanding as well.

This isn’t a normal Torchwood tale. It’s something richer and stranger, more personal and far angrier and, in the end, kinder than almost anything else in the show’s range.

Verdict: Expertly written and played it’s a remarkable story, directed with wit and subtlety by Lisa Bowerman and expertly sound designed by Richard Fox.  The entire range is very good but this is something exceptional and if you start anywhere, it should be here, in the infidel places. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

Click here to order from Big Finish

Cambridge Boys Celebrate