George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma brings to its audience a comedic, powerful, and unquestionably timely examination of the ethics and morality of medicine and the value of life as a highlight of the Festival's sixtieth season.
Anyone who thinks Shaw is hopelessly wordy and incredibly dated or irrelevant had far better come and see this production before closing the book on that subject.
One of the intriguing aspects of this script is that the play spares nobody in laying all of its varied characters open to the judgement of the audience. Unlike some of his works, our sympathy is not totally and irrevocably tilted towards any one person or point of view. At the end of the performance, we are left with more questions than answers, with conflicting visions of morality that are difficult or impossible to sustain, and with even more questions about what will happen next to several of the characters.
Plainly, the only way to approach such a richly layered theatre piece is to simply perform it, allow the various characters fair play to be themselves to the full, and let the chips fall where they may as far as the audience's reaction may go.
This five-act play was designed by the author for the commercial theatres of London in his day, where the concept of a full evening with two intermissions was quite normal. The Shaw has decided to perform it with only a single intermission, and has also opted to place the intermission after Act II, leaving three full scenes to be gotten through in the second "half." As a result, the performance takes just about an hour before the single break, but something closer to ninety minutes after. Audiences be warned. But it does make sense; the dramatic continuity would be fatally compromised by a break any later in the show.
At the outset of the play, we are given first the chance to meet the quartet of specialist doctors who represent one side of the dilemma. Diana Donnelly's production respects the need for each of these four to be entirely sincere about presenting their points of view, even though those views sound richly idiotic to audiences familiar with today's state of medical knowledge. The doctors' obsessions would have seemed somewhat less idiotic in 1906, and were in fact all rooted in theories actively promoted by doctors of that day. However, Shaw had his own views about health and none of the doctors are spared the satirical lash.
The first is Dr. Colenso Ridgeon, who has just received a Nobel Prize and thus is at the very peak of medical fame. He is successively visited and congratulated by three colleagues, Dr. Patricia Cullen, Dr. Cutler Walpole, and Dr. Ralph Bloomfield Bonnington.
Sanjay Talwar brings a dimension of humanity to Ridgeon, a man who could easily come across as a stuck-up, arrogant snob. That sense of humanity becomes critically important as the play unfolds. Allan Louis as Walpole and David Adams as Bonnington give much more highly coloured performances, particularly when each has a pet theory of illness to apply to every case that crosses their path. Sharry Flett, as Cullen, is the only one who seems to have a grasp of the human dimension to medicine, a realization that a doctor must treat not merely the patient but the people around the patient. Flett uses a relatively moderate tone of voice to great effect, becoming by default the one real voice of compassion in the story as it unfolds.
On the other side are two younger men: Dr. Blenkinsop (played for this performance by Kevin McLachlan) and Louis Dubedat, an artist (Johnathan Sousa). There is also Dubedat's wife, Jennifer (Alexis Gordon) -- and, in fact, we meet her first, pleading ardently for her husband's life. Ardour is Jennifer's chief audible characteristic and Gordon plays the ardour and the passion, driving it for almost all she's worth -- but doesn't overplay it.
Sousa, later on, shares the ardour and passion as Louis but -- and it is a noteworthy "but" -- where her passion is all for him, his is mostly for himself. Blenkinsop's passion is for his patients, driving him to neglect his own health so he can offer maximum service to the residents of the poorer neighbourhood where he lives and works.
All three of these characters were given notable life and vibrancy, in their different ways, by Gordon, Sousa, and McLachlan.
Incidental to the main drama, but each illuminating in their different ways, were four smaller but significant roles: Ridgeon's assistant Redpenny (Michael Man), his receptionist/housekeeper (to judge by her costume) Emmy (Claire Jullien), the unfortunate Minnie Tinwell (Katherine Gauthier), and the Newspaperman (Nathanael Judah).
The dilemma which arises for Ridgeon, and his colleagues, is the fact that both young men are infected with tuberculosis, and both are in an advancing state of the disease. Ridgeon's promising new lifesaving treatment for TB, which earned him the Nobel, can be given to only a limited number of patients at a time and his roster is full. He can squeeze in one more, but not two.
Who lives and who dies? It was a familiar refrain in the early days of the pandemic when hospitals in the hotspot areas were overwhelmed with patients, and doctors had to make such choices over and over. It's when this dilemma emerges that the audience realizes just how timely and contemporary this play actually is. Until this point, the satirical treatment of the specialists has made the carefully modern sets and costumes appear to be so much window dressing on a funny old play -- but now it becomes deadly serious, in the most literal sense of the word.
That's just the first act. The remainder of the play is devoted to the working out of the consequences of this entire situation. In this working out, none of the characters are permitted to be the least bit perfect. One and all suffer from major flaws which knock the pedestals out from other their feet. What all the actors and the director have captured in an ideal way is the fact that each one continues to feel him/herself perfect, while mentally and verbally scourging some or all of the others. Shaw's observation of human nature is uncomfortably on point here -- especially since we, the onlookers, have undoubtedly done just that at some points during the first two acts.
As in so many Shaw plays, the final resolution presents no resolution at all. The fourth act ends with the lengthy but curiously analytical death scene of Louis Dubedat. In this scene, the four doctors become a kind of Greek chorus, observing and occasionally commenting on the main action of Jennifer holding and comforting Louis. At this point, the production resorted to having Sousa speak into a flashy gold microphone and from that point on he became frequently hard to hear as the movements of his hands kept taking the mike away from the key point near his mouth. It was frustrating because this lengthy, quasi-operatic death scene is at least a fine piece of writing, even if it is rather too long to be entirely effective.
This is followed by the fifth act, a final confrontation between Jennifer and Ridgeon, in which far more questions are posed than are answered. To appearances, and especially from Gordon's strong presentation of her speeches here, Jennifer Dubedat has achieved for herself a resolution which Colenso Ridgeon has not -- but is that really true, behind her finely assured words?
I could go on at much greater length, but the special genius of The Doctor's Dilemma is precisely the way in which the characters appear so certain in themselves but the audience is left so deeply uncertain, acutely and uncomfortably aware that many issues defy all attempts to find pat answers and neat solutions.
Gillian Gallow created extremely effective sets for each of the four locations. The condo set for Act I and the dinner table for Act II spread widely across the Festival Theatre's stage, emphasizing the spacious environments in which the rich and well-to-do get to live and work. The art gallery set for Act V adopted a stark and four-square look, reminding me of the cubist condo set in Act I.
In between, we got the dark and paint-spattered home of the Dubedats. Said to be a loft, it actually looked and felt, and was lit, like a claustrophobic cellar with an uncomfortably steep staircase the only entry point. This constricted set was squeezed into the centre of the stage, surrounded by uncertain areas of shadow. Here, Gallow built a kind of miniature proscenium "stage" accessed by steps up a stack of milk crates, to act as a centrepiece, with the walls around it covered with Louis' paintings -- including a striking but surreal portrait of Jennifer.
Rachel Forbes designed costumes which gave identity and individuality to the doctors, the artist, the artist's wife, the young doctor, and the side characters. Her costumes for the party scene were noteworthy in presenting all the people in a different and brighter way, just as happens when real-world people dress up for a real party.
Michelle Ramsay's notable lighting designs presented a key link in creating the different worlds of the play: the modern sterile condo, the flashy party table, the dingy cellar, and the crisp gallery.
Above all, director Diana Donnelly has captured the key condition of giving full time and strength to all the viewpoints, bringing out in full the strengths and weaknesses of all the key characters, and letting all the ideas take their turn at centre stage -- all while keeping the play as a whole moving forward with effective momentum and clarity.
I've enjoyed all three plays that I've seen at the Shaw this season, but The Doctor's Dilemma is the one that's made the strongest impact and given me the most thought -- and the most unease. I like to think that GBS would approve.
No comments:
Post a Comment