Reviews
The master's voice
John Peter, Sunday Times, April 27, 1975
BERNARD SHAW is supposed by some advanced theorists these days to be old-fashioned, but you would hardly have thought so if you had seen the large and attentive audience at Robert Chetwyn's revival of The Doctor's Dilemma (Mermaid).
Shaw's contemporaries used to complain that his plays were not really plays but intellectual debates; today's occasional charge is that his targets have long collapsed and his concerns are dated. Could anything be more inaccurate? Observe the skill of the opening at the Mermaid which imparts a lot of information without seeming to do so, and also gets the action going briskly. The characters seem to know each other hideously well: the rattled familiarity with which the eminent doctors treat each other's medical obsessions hint at decades of' ghastly intimacy.
Frank Thornton's crusty Sir Patrick Cullen, a Dublin accent overlaid by good London living, is excellent in these scenes, and James Villiers, as BB. floats his dotty arias about stimulating the phagocytes with admirable timing and the unmistakable cocky indifference of the master crusader. (Moments of anger, however bring out the bluster of the old-fashioned actor in him.)
The moral burden of the play rests on Louis Dubedat, artist and parasite, whom Ken Cranham plays as a sharp-faced, nimble predator with no time for drawing-room graces, manly but charmless. Surely this is a mistake. Listen to Cutler Walpole talking of his "dazzling cheek ": you expect something more attractive and beguiling, a romantic buccaneer. When the doctors decide they won't save him it comes as hardly a shock (especially as the man they will save instead, poor Dr Blenkinsop, gets such a finely etched, dignified performance from James Cairncross).
Yes, the play does stow its joints a little; but it is impossible not to be held by the force of Shaw's moral reasoning, the way he grapples with the imperatives of human worth and medical expediency. The last scene I've always found an embarrassment: as at the end of "Saint Joan," we see Shaw crossing his ethical t's and dotting his dramatic i's. But the difficult passage brings the best out of Derek Godfrey's Colenso, a dark, muted medical Mephistopheles, and Lynn Farleigh's lyrical but always intelligent Jennifer. The play is set by Patrick Robertson with Spartan simplicity, utterly appropriate to a time when we pump money into inefficient factories but withhold help from consumptive theatres.
Doctor's Dilemma
Nicholas de Jongh, Guardian, April 22, 1975
ROBERT CHETWYN who directs this revival of the Doctor's Dilemma says the play is more than a mere lampoon of Edwardian doctors - rather a conflict between conventional morality and the artist's well-known anarchic impulse; a savage comedy with life in the lists against death. But that gives the play a distinction it does not really deserve.
Shaw was enticed by his own cleverness in making his repertoire, of knighted and fashionable doctors agents of destruction, stupidity and quackery. The whole first act is a caricature anthology of their unlovely and dangerous absurdities - "drugs can only suppress symptoms," Cutler Walpole diagnosing blood poisoning in everyone, organs cut out for the sheer surgicaI joy of it.
But once Shaw establishes his central dramatic antagonism the play's purpose does deepen and extend. Sir Colenso Ridgeon has to choose whether to save the life of a tubercular doctor who is poor and dedicated or a brilliant artist who screws money from every gullible medicine man and admirer in sight.
The encounter between this life enhancing artist and the establishment of silly doctors does puncture their pretension and dogma beautifully. And you can see that there is Chetwyn's conflict between the sensual artist (Louis Dubedat) and the doctors who are united only by their prejudices about love and convention.
Yet Shaw's self-protective cynicism reduces the nature of this struggler of Ridgeon's dilemma since the doctors' corrupt motives are discovered in the end. It was all a false crisis and a false debate; so Mr Chetwyn's grand seriousness is, however effectively deployed in this interesting revival, not ideal; sardonic light harshness would have been better. But on an almost bare stage, sensibly uncluttered, the play's physicians are gorgeous and funny emblems of diverse ignorance - particularly James Villlier's self contented B.B. and Nigel Hawthorne's cunning sentimental Cutler Walpole.
While Ken Cranham's Dubedat memorably creates an unsentimental artist Lynn Farleigh as his wife belongs with Robert Chetwyn's interpretation. She gives the role an earnest over-emotional intensity and Derek Godfrey's Ridgeon does not suggest sufficiently the smug and sinister aspects of the roje, though the last emotion emerges powerfully.
The Doctor's Dilemma
Mermaid
Charles Lewsen, The Times, April 22, 1975
In a programme note, the director Robert Chetwyn described Shaw's medical satire as "a savage comedy that on every level deals with life versus death".
However, Mr Chetwyn begins the evening on a note of amiable naturalism; and - save in scene changes , strikingly effected by stage hands dressed up as undertakers - it is not until a skeleton in cardinal's robes begins to dominate Patrick Robertson's austere set in the third act, that Mr Chetwyn begins physically to make his point.
In the first two acts, the doctors - who should, in Mr Chetwyn's reading, represent death - are presented in terms of half-hearted realism. This is partly Mr Chetwyn's failure to follow his idea, partly British actors' distaste for committed embodiment of an author's scorn (which is why Jonson is no doubt played better on the Continent than in his own land). The naturalism sets on wondering why the doctors manage to spend so much of their time away from their patients, presents the scenes as pure debates, and reduces the men's obsessions to catchphrases.
Since the words are so good, the debates are entertaining; and within the limits of the production, James Villiers - though he has yet to find full confidence in the role - is a delight as BB, the Shakespeare mish-mash being an especial joy.
At the centre Lynn Farleigh does not project that faith - not unakin to that of Shaw's Joan - that should make the doctors all fall for her in their first off-stage meeting with her. Nor has Mr Chetwyn organized a memorable first encounter between Ms Farleigh and the Ridgeon of Derek Godfrey, who fails to suggest either sensualist, scientist, or a man in any way interested in his power to dispose of another's life.
On the other hand, Ken Cranham manages to make the fact of Dubedat even more interesting than the hearsay, Looking rather like Rupert Brooke playing Autolycus, he gets full value from the sponging, though he could perhaps afford the shade of the sardonic in the creed, which he tops with a magnificently timed false death. Overall, Mr Cranham gives substance to the central moral problem of the play, the weighing of human worth.
The Doctor's Dilemma
Milton Shulman, Evening Standard, April 22, 1975
DOCTORS have an advantage over other mere mortals. They profess to know the secrets of the human body. That is why we hold them in such awe.
The Doctor's Dilemma by Bernard Shaw at the Mermaid still amuses us, in spite of the fustiness of some of its arguments, because it brings the medical profession down to the mundane level of the rest of us. It ridicules their methods and deflates their presumptions.
While Shaw has his obvious fun satirising the physicians who will inoculate on every occasion to stimulate the phagocytes or the surgeons who will chop away the nuciform sac at every opportunity to keep the body whole, he is also questioning the right of doctors to play God in the dispensation of their talents.
Just as hospital authorities today may have to decide who should get the benefit of a kidney machine or a transplant, so Shaw posed in 1906 the problem of what moral criteria ought to govern doctors in their choice of patients.
Louis Dubedat is a brilliant young artist; but by Edwardian standards a thorough cad. He is a scrounger, a liar, a womaniser and a cultural snob.
Should he be given Special treatment to cure his tuberculosis rather than an honest plodding doctor whose death will deprive society of very little? Because Dubedat has an attractive wife, played with winning, but perhaps over-earnest, appeal by Lynn Farleigh, the ethical question of his survival forces itself upon this coterie of fashionable doctors.
Perhaps the most daring achievement of this witty and provocative play is its ability to give us a death-bed scene that is scandalously irreverent and funny. It manages to strip death of its hypocrisy while retaining its dignity.
Robert Chetwyn's somewhat stiff direction emphasises the formal, mannered nature of the encounters between the doctors.
In Derek Godfrey, Frank Thornton, Nigel Hawthorne and James Villiers, this production has as congenial, self-deluding, cynical a group of doctors as has ever been baffled by the inevitability of patients dying in spite of perfect treatment. Ken Cranham might be a little less robust as the consumptive Dubedat.
A word more of Sir Ralph; he could surely give the definitive performance of his namesake, surnamed Bloomfield Bonington, the consultant with the bland, healing voice in Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma. James Villiers, who now plays B.B, at the Mermaid, is excellent, with all the required rotundity of voice and manner if not of shape. He only falls short of the ideal in being visibly too young and in failing to make the celebrated Shakespearian recitation at Dubedat's death as moving as it is funny.
His professional colleagues are equally admirable: Frank Thornton. Nigel Hawthorne, James Cairncross, Tony Jay and Derek Godfrey, whose watchful irony, finally and explosively punctured, in the pivotal part of Ridgeon suggest that he might play a definitive Duke in 'Measure for Measure.' Lynn Farleigh similarly qualifies for Isabella with her direct unembarrassed passion as Mrs Dubedat, pleading for her husband's life. (Miss Farleigh, who was the wife longing for a child in David Rudkin's 'Ashes' has been having some tough times in doctors' surgeries.) Ken Cranhan, whom I had thought an unalterably contemporary actor. surprised me with the accuracy of his Dubedat; he dies, as he lives, with the right mischevious ambiguity.
Mentioning everybody is my tribute to Robert Chetwyn's production, one of the best stagings of Shaw I have seen and hardly inferior to the National's 'Heartbreak House.' It is neither a spuriously topical polemic nor an excuse for orating stars to swop easy paradoxes. Mr Chetwyn gets the right laughs by stamping on the wrong ones. Right at the start he refuses to let the old housekeeper (Ruby Head) be endearing; her dismissal of science - 'you won't think much of it when you've lived as long with it as I have ' - is deadly serious. 'Deadly' is the word throughout; a skeleton, with scythe and hour-glass, dominates Dubedat's studio. It is specified by the author and it stands out against a plain background. Mr Chetwyn's deployment of Shaw's stage-imagery is exemplary.
Topical wit of 'Doctor's Dilemma'
Eric Shorter, Daily Telegraph, April 22, 1975
THE sheer fun of Shaw's Doctor's Dilemma comes over well in Robert Chetwyn's revival at the Mermaid Theatre. It is hard to recall a jollier production.
And the author's wit at the expense of the medical profession seems as topical as ever. When were doctors deflated with more gaiety?
When was that prize example, the booming Bloomfield Bonington, played with more reverberative and rhetorical absurdity than by the excellently smug James Villiers?
The sheer feeling of the comedy is another matter. There is a good deal of it and it comes in lumps and the essential levity of Shaw has never made it easy to put over with persuasion.
But we ought, I think, to be made less awkwardly aware of it than we are at the Mermaid.
As the physician who has to choose between the lives of two men - a rascally but talented artist and a meekly honest but humdrum general practitioner - Derek Godfrey seems curiously offhand.
Nor is his fancy for the artist's wife, played somewhat colourlessly by Lynn Farleigh, effectively expressed until the final scene, to which Mr Godfrey brings a superb sense of irony.
In addition to Mr Villiers, there is a good dry performance from Nigel Hawthorne as an advocate of blood poisoning, a nice sketch from Tony Jay as a foreign medical observer, and a bustling description of motherly retainerhood from Ruby Head.
If Ken Cranham's ruthless painter is too Shavian to be true, it may be that too many bees were buzzing in Shaw's bonnet for his play to have a single and coherent sting as drama. But after 69 years it is still tickling enough as entertainment.
The Doctor's Dilemma
Tabler, June 1975
Robert Chetwyn, directing Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma at the Mermaid, calls it 'a savage comedy that on every level deals with life versus death'. The doctors are seen as angels of death and Louis Dubedat, the selfish artist, as the life force.
The dilemma the doctor, Sir Colenso Ridgeon, played by Derek Godfrey, faces is in choosing which of two serious tubercular cases to treat, Dubedat, played by Ken Cranham, or the honest and poor Dr. Blenkinsop played by James Cairncross. His encounter with Dubedat's wife, played by Lynn Farleigh, convinces him that the genius must be saved; his encounter with Dubedat makes him feel that Dr. Blenkinsop is the more worthy. And, indeed, does he really want to save the n'er-do-well husband of the woman he now loves? He turns Dubedat over to the fashionable and scandalously incompetent Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, an excellent performance here by James Villiers.
It is a pity that Shaw added a postscript and that it is still retained. The scene at the deathbed of Louis Dubedat says it all, dramatically and effectively. Dubedat tells his wife never to wear black, always to be beautiful and to marry again. When he dies, she re-appears before the doctors in a yellow silk dress, and says she will shake hands with all her friends. As Sir Colenso approaches, she withdraws her hand. 'I said, my friends. Goodbye, Sir Colenso'. An anticlimax, after that, to show her married again and encountering Sir Colenso by chance, only to exchange mutual recriminations.
