IT is, a depressing thought (to me, at least) that my children may well be engaged in about fifty years' time in writing nostalgic autobiography about the new Elizabethan age and their kith and kin, the Daleks. It seems to me quite apparent that Mr Terry Nation's creations are a great deal more real to children than their parents are. Saturday teatime is sacred to the one-eyed monster : everything must stop at the first throbbing electronic notes of "Dr Who."
With this sort of fervour behind it, how can the Wyndham's Theatre's Christmas offering, "The Curse of the Daleks," possibly be subjected to normal critical judgment? It seemed to me to have all the faults of the television production—utterly improbable situations developed in even less probable prose by a troupe of wooden figures. This is being hard on the cast, who cope as best they can with lines that come straight from a Victorian novel (someone actually has the line "You're just rotten through and through.").
But how can they hope to compete with those terrifying monsters, who will upstage them worse than children or animals? The first half is nothing but a drawn-out prelude to their full appearance, and in the post-interval development I, for one, was completely convinced that the Daleks had taken over. "It's marvellous acting," breathed my eight-year-old at one tense point in the drama. The stage at that moment was peopled entirely by winking and rumbling ironmongery. Roth he and his brother emerged ecstatic. Mr Nation discovered a few thousand pounds ago "The-Daleks-Are-Invincible.".
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