The 1920s roar and Sir Reggie bellows with laughter, joie de vivre and the amoral joy of the gentleman adventurer. Forster is his loyal butler, the world is saved just in time for tea and nothing changes. Until Peter Janks arrives, The Serpentine Club opens and Everything Changes.

In the tension between entertainment and discomfort, art tightens its coils. Ash Darby’s script moves with the swagger of Janks, daring you to keep up with the light as a feather flat out sprint of Reggie and Forster’s newly minted era of Torchwood. Simon Kane’s stoical murder butler is superb, a working class Jeeves whose immaculately tailored PTSD and self-loathing is held in check by brutal denial and very big jigsaw puzzles. Wilf Scolding’s Sir Reggie is Bertie Wooster with three times the energy and a tenth of the impulse control. Lazy, brilliant, useless and vital, he’s Forster’s world in more ways than he thinks.

Then Janks arrives.

Darby, director Scott Handcock and sound designer Rob Harvey set the stage for this increasingly tense power play with a sense of space and volume. There’s a vital sign in a ballroom full of mirrors that feels vast as it dwarfs Forster’s attempts to take control of the situation. Janks’ cheery invasions of privacy feel tight and confined. The chaos Janks, and the Serpentine Club, embody shatter the life Forster has built for himself and Kane plays every inch of the pain the man undergoes. There’s no Doctor, no resources, no hope. Just two men, both representing what he can’t bring himself to acknowledge, both different kinds of threat and one far better at his job than he was before being possessed by the Mara.

That possession drags the three men into the deep water and we swim right along with them. The cast all revel in being able to show us who these men really are as opposed to who they tell themselves they are.  Timothy Blore’s Janks is a swaggering, arrogant thug who is revealed to be a terrified child trapped in a man’s body and a life he can’t understand. Scolding is searingly brilliant as the terrified Reggie and the languid, playfully spiteful Mara. But Kane is who leaves the lasting impression. Forster could have been a tragic figure: a man trapped by his class, unable to acknowledge his own sexuality and hiding inside the rituals of order that have been invaded by something unknowable because that’s all he knows. But as the tension rises and the story concludes we see that Forster is the one with the clearest vision of all. He knows who Reggie is, who Peter is, what the Mara is. He knows what he has to do, not just for himself but for the world. Working class rage, love and lust. Past trauma and the opportunity to use this serpentine brave new world to stop it recurring. A man who has accepted subservience, embracing control. The ending here is funny, horrific, vindicating and sweet all at once. The cast are fantastic, the sound design and direction on point.

Verdict: A gripping, tense, wickedly clever addition to what remains Big Finish’s most consistent and innovative line of stories. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

Click here to order from Big Finish