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{{article | publication = The Illustrated London News | file = http://cuttingsarchive.org/images/d/d1/1966-01-08_Illustrated_London_News.pdf | px = | height = | width = | date = 1966-01-08 | author = J. C. Trewin | pages = 30 | language = English | type = | description = | categories = The Curse of the Daleks | moreTitles = | morePublications = | moreDates = | text = We can doubt whether there has been any pantomime on the planet Skaro, though once the Daleks are re-powered --as inevitably they will be—they will probably consider the idea: a Dalek Twankey should be a sight, and maybe a clanger. I have brooded about the creatures because they are now appearing (for matinees) on the Wyndham's Theatre stage in a play entitled The Curse of the Daleks, by David Whitaker and Terry Nation. The programme cover illustrates one of the alarming things—a cross between an embossed conning tower, an angry pillarbox, and a mobile pepperpot fitted with vicious probes. In speech a Dalek can sound like the distant noise of slow and menacing typewriters. Apparently they are powered by static electricity. The dramatists discuss this in detail; but all I know is that the Daleks, who have been out of commission for 50 years, suddenly come alive. It is very awkward for the mixed crew and passenger list of the space ship Starfinder which has landed on Skaro, but matters work out blithely by the end of a play in which every second person is somebody else (I am not speaking of the leader of the race of Thals, or his sister, because we all know—or do we?—that a Thai is just that). The piece loiters along at first; it needs a Dalek to set it in real motion. Though these things seem to me to be less genuinely frightening than the old (and outmoded) robots of R.U.R., they clang away briskly; Gillian Howell, the director, has sustained the tensions; the cast never lets her down; and the programme invites us all to search for little glass cubes, twice the size of a lump of sugar, that may be hidden in a clump of grass, or lying at the base of a tree I forgot to say that the planet Skaro is in the next universe but one. Mr. Bart might profitably send up a company with Son of Twang (four exclamation marks). }}

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