Before continuing, please be aware that all of this content is made possible by the goodwill and support of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy the work on this site, please consider supporting the creation of more content like this by clicking the button.
The Assassin in the Limelight lands you square in Ford’s Theatre on April 14 1865 — the exact night Abraham Lincoln was shot — with The Doctor (Sixth, Colin Baker) and Evelyn Smythe stepping in just before history’s bullet does. The set-up is glorious: a body-hopping alien infestation, a time-meddler villain pretending to be Oscar Wilde, and the fate of a nation hanging by a thread. It’s ambitious and it almost works.
The first three-quarters of the story are the strongest. The theatre’s back-rooms smell of sweat and stage-light grease. The cast struts and sneers with believable desperation as conspiracy slips between their lines. Evelyn and the Doctor snoop, dodge, try to read history wrong side up — and the tension builds through whispered threats, distant gunshots outside, and the quiet dread that history isn’t a safe script. The alien menace (those nasty Indo) gives a creeping horror beneath the cobblestones and gaslight, and the time-meddling villain Dr Robert Knox (Leslie Phillips) slips elegantly through time playing heroes, murderers, critics and fiends. The setup pulses with promise: alternate assassins, altered history, moral panic, doomed orphans, and the looming strain of history about to snap.
But then the last act yawns. History needs to reset. The bullet must fly. The clever threads of deceit, double identity and creeping horror get shoved off-screen. Plotlines collapse into coincidence. Knox is defeated off-mic. The alien threat is neutralised through a “trap TARDIS lift” deus ex machina. And just like that the story closes its shutters and history marches on as if nothing ever happened. The emotional and thematic stakes — justice, fate, the price of interference — get binned so that the Schtick of “Lincoln must die or else the future melts” can be preserved.
So yes, the listen is still fun. The performances are fantastic. Colin Baker’s Doctor is lean, witty and sharp. Evelyn has her best “pulling the history textbook out of her bag and reading aloud” moments. Phillps chews the scenery with flamboyant menace. The supporting cast of actors playing theatre-goers, stagehands, policemen, veterans of the Civil War add colour and grit. The pace moves well when the plot is moving. The atmosphere — Victorian theatre, fearful whispers, vague shapes lurking in gaslight — is front-row seat chills.
But I am disappointed. For what begins with the potential tension of “can we stop history and still let it happen correctly” it ends in a shrug of “well it did, didn’t it?” It ends without consequence, without reckoning. The climax feels cheap, so much so that it almost mocks the intelligent elements that came before.
Final thoughts:
If you want a pulp-style time-travel thriller with good acting and zippy dialogue then Assassin in the Limelight delivers. If you’re hoping for a story that wrestles with history, responsibility, and the consequences of meddling — it abandons you in the busiest corridor of Ford’s Theatre.
Rating: 4 out of 5 whiskey-soaked theatre programmes folded under your jacket pocket, waiting to go off in a time vortex.