Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: David Warner, Susanna Harker, David Collings, Arthur Bostrom, Jo Castleton, Neil Cole, Michael Chance, Nigel Fairs, Suzanne Proctor, Linda Bartram.
It is perhaps not the threat of confinement, justice, or even morals that keeps the vast majority of society on the straight and narrow, but perhaps rather the fear of spending a portion of their life behind bars with Time for company. The trepidation is not the sense of the law exacting its revenge on you for your crimes, but the retribution sought by Time as it has the ability to make you feel the damnation of all that you may have destroyed, taken, and killed.
It may come as a surprise that anyone ever involved with Sapphire And Steel had not utilised the idea of a prison setting to capture the raw intensity that comes from such an ordeal handed down by the state, by any government; after all prison is supposed to be the ultimate deterrent in today’s society, but for some the prospect of being haunted by the sins of the past as you contemplate the idea of being a Dead Man Walking is far greater a serious and grave weightier matter than we might give creedence to.
A death in prison can be a source for wounds to be revealed. In society such an event is rightly concerning, it makes people suspicious, it eats away at the notion of civilised society, fingers are pointed, but ultimately society prevails; the law of the jungle that is a prison is a far tougher regime to crack, scores are settled, favours are asked of, the punishment due is taken to extremes,
It is in this extreme of Time that the final story of the first season of Sapphire and Steel audios, Dead Man Walking, takes up the cause, by placing Sapphire into the mind of a man whose future is uncertain, the schism in time created means that the danger of being inside is folded in on itself, no escape from the perceived criminal justice to be found.
The setting of a prison is one that brings up the thought of hostility, especially before all the various penal reform acts in recent years, and in solitude, Time has a way to eat at a person’s soul, to take advantage of the situation for its own needs; in the same way that an asylum holds negative energy, so to does a prison, and the stamp of authority, from both staff and inmate makes Dead Man Walking a tale of fear even more imposing upon the listener.
With a particularly impressive performance by David Warner as Steel, the understandable reaction to seeing first-hand what a human being is capable of when reduced to nothing more than a number with its rights removed, Dead Man Walking is a classic finish to an admirable first season on audio by Big Finish; well worth the wait in Time.
Ian D. Hall