Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✭✩
by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Morris Panych
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 9-October 30, 2010
“Death Panels Circa 1906"
The Shaw Festival’s current production of Shaw’s “The Doctor’s Dilemma” reveals a play as relevant and thought-provoking now as it was in 1906 when it first premiered. While it is not as trenchant and groundbreaking as the production helmed by Christopher Newton in 2000, Morris Panych’s direction is solid and straightforward, focussing on the parallels between doctor and patient and the multiple ironies that grow out of these parallels.
We meet the doctor of the title, Sir Colenso Ridgeon, on the day his knighthood is announced. Five others doctors arrive to congratulate Ridgeon on his new honour, but the one who provokes his dilemma is Jennifer Dubedat, the healthy, beautiful wife of an artist, Louis Dubedat, who is stricken with tuberculosis. Ridgeon has received his knighthood for his experimental cure for the disease and Jennifer would like him to take her husband into his clinic. All the available spaces, however, are full. Ridgeon is thus confronted with at least three dilemmas. To cure Dubedat, he would have to condemn to likely death one of the patients he has already accepted. To make matters worse, one of Ridgeon’s friends, Dr. Blenkisop, a GP whose practice is among the poor, has also contracted tuberculosis. If Ridgeon is to make room for one more patient, should it be the amoral artistic genius Dubedat or the moral, self-sacrificing Doctor Blenkisop? On top of that, Ridgeon has fallen hopelessly in love with Jennifer. How can he certain that reason rather than self-interest will guide his decision?
In 2000 Newton took the bold step of directing the play as if it were an Expressionist work in the mode of Frank Wedekind’s “Pandora’s Box” (1902) or Strindberg’s “The Ghost Sonata” (1907) where a background grotesquerie reflected the world’s loss of a moral compass. The set changes were done by actors wearing half-masks of skulls such as are worn in Latin America for the celebrations of the Day of the Dead. This immediately set the macabre-comic tone of this comedy with death at its centre. As in Expressionist drama, Ridgeon’s five colleagues were portrayed as grotesque caricatures against which the human drama of Ridgeon and Mr. and Mrs. Dubedat was played out. Newton’s approach brought out the relation of fame and death in the play that highlighted the play’s brilliance and subversiveness.
Panych does not take so bold an approach but he still makes Ridgeon’s dilemmas admirably clear while set designer Ken MacDonald establishes fascinating parallels between the worlds of art and medicine. Ridgeon’s surgery is decorated not with paintings but with enormous x-rays, the central panel of his hallway occupied with a floor-to-ceiling length x-ray of a woman from pelvis to neck, curiously reversed with the heart on the right-hand side. Dubedat’s loft, in contrast, is decorated entirely with paintings and sketches. What MacDonald’s design cleverly suggests is that doctor’s view their patients from the inside out while artists view their subjects from the outside in. The juxtaposition asks, “Which method gets closest to the truth?” Given the comical infighting among the doctors about treatments and their unanimity about Dubedat’s genius, Shaw seems to suggest that the greatest artist will have greater insight into humanity than the greatest doctor. Ridgeon tells Jennifer, “The soul is an organ I have not come across in the course of my anatomical work”, to which she retorts, “If you dissected me you could not find my conscience. Do you think I have got none?” The brilliant culmination of MacDonald’s design is to entitle Dubedat’s posthumous exhibition “Dubedat’s Doctors”, thus allowing Dubedat to immortalize both himself and the doctors through his art while making the doctors’ exteriors permanent symbols of their inner nature. That all the black-and-white portraits are splashed with blood-red paint finally brings forward the link between art and death so prominent in the 2000 production.
With two exceptions, the acting is consistently excellent. With Ridgeon, Patrick Galligan adds another portrait to his collection of well-meaning but conflicted men. He is polished enough to makes us believe he is a famous doctor but he is also boyish enough to make us believe that he doesn’t recognize love for what it is when it first hits him. Krista Colosimo, in her first big role on the Festival stage, is superb as Jennifer. She wonderfully portrays Jennifer’s earnest and guileless manner that in its openness could be misconstrued as flirtation though it clearly is not.
Ridgeon’s doctor friends are portrayed naturalistically. They may have their idées fixes but Panych does not push this to abnormality. As Sir Patrick Cullen, Michael Ball is the irritated voice of the old days that the younger generation disregards. Thom Marriott is a hoot as the pompous Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington. As Mr. Cutler Walpole, Patrick McManus gives a fine impression of a small-minded man who so conviced of his own ideas that he doesn’t realize how his obsession with the non-existent “nuciform sac” makes him an object of ridicule. Ric Reid makes Dr. Blenkinsop a pitiable character indeed whose shabby presence is tolerated only because he is Ridgeon’s friend. Panych creates some inventive stage business in which the hapless Blenkisop is so out of synch in shaking hands with the others that it never happens.
The disappointments in the the cast are Catherine McGregor as Ridgeon’s housekeeper Emmy and more importantly Jonathan Gould as the artist Louis Dubedat. Nothing is wrong with McGregor’s acting. She does the best she can in the role. The problem is that despite the greyed hair and the stooped back, she is about the same age at Ridgeon. Surely, there are enough actors in Canada of the proper age to cast in this role. In 2000 Emmy was played by Jennifer Phipps. Age is important because Ridgeon must be seen to be unworldly and babied at home by his housekeeper. This is central to establishing the parallel with Dubedat who is coddled by his wife.
Gould has difficult precedents to follow with Steven Sutcliffe’s Dubedat as a tragic figure in 1991 and Mike Shara’s graspingly cynical Dubedat in 2000. Gould’s portrayal inclines to neither side. Panych tries to find comedy in the matter-of-factness of Dubedat’s amorality but seems to ignore his illness as a factor in his character. Mike Shara’s Dubedat directed his dying speech as much to the newspaper reporter as to his wife, thus turning even his death into a media event. Gould seems to forget entirely about the reporter until the text requires he ask for him. The last thing Dubedat should seem is bland, but that is what Gould and Panych make him.
This may not be the finest “Doctor’s Dilemma” the Shaw Festival has mounted, but it has enough strengths, particularly the performances of galligan and Colosimo, to be recommended. For those who have shied away from Shaw fearing rumours of his wordiness, this would make a fine first Shaw to see since its central debate about who in society is most worth saving still rages on.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Krista Colosimo and Patrick Galligan. ©David Cooper.
2010-08-17
The Doctor’s Dilemma