The Burning Prince, by John Dorney
The Acheron Pulse, by Rick Briggs
The Shadow Heart, by Jonathan Morris

This is a brilliant idea, though it’s taken me over a year to write it up; Big Finish did a trilogy featuring successively Peter Davison (who I met in Slough last August), Colin Baker (who I met in Antwerp today) and Sylvester McCoy (who I met in LA in February last year) as the Doctor, travelling alone on each occasion, and intervening in the affairs of the Drashani Empire. Kirsty Besterman, who I hadn’t otherwise come across, plays a different character in all three plays, the beautiful Princess Aliona, then Aliona’s cousin Cheni, than Aliona’s clone; James Wilby appears as the mysterious character Tenebris in the second and third plays.

They are three quite different plays. In the first, The Burning Prince, the Fifth Doctor gets stuck into a dynastic marriage situation which turns out to have more complications than expected; there are a couple of excellent plot twists. The Acheron Pulse is a bit weaker, featuring some comic barbarians who are fine but don’t add a lot to the story; but at the end it picks up quite significantly, with the Doctor trying to set things right. The Shadow Heart has some memorable guest characters – Chase Masterson as intergalactic bounty hunter Vienna Salvatore, Eve Karpf and Alex Mallinson as a couple of scrap merchants who roam the stars in a gian snail – and a lovely plot structure where the story starts halfway through the Doctor’s timeline, and he first comes into it (from his perspective) half way through us listening to it.

On reflection I think the first of these is the best, but they are a neat assemblage.