“Life,” said Bernard Shaw, “does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” The Doctor’s Dilemma, written in 1906 in answer to a challenge that he could not write a comic death scene, is one of the best satires on the fallibility and arrogance of the medical profession. “We’re not a profession but a conspiracy,” says one doctor. The bungling, callous, self-absorbed physicians, with their pet theories and favourite cures, are portrayed as “ignorant, licensed murderers, whose reputation, like an African king’s palace, stands on a foundation of dead bodies.” They perform useless, indiscriminate and highly lucrative operations.
Malcolm Sinclair has the exact measure of Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, a colossal bore, who stimulates the phagocytes, uses toxins quite indiscriminately and murders Shakespeare as certainly as he murders his patients. “What is operation?” he asks and answers his own question: “Manual labour!”
The dilemma is a question of ethics and with the present NHS financial difficulties it is no longer quite as artificial as it once seemed. If only one operation can be performed, which patient should the surgeon choose? In this particular case the choice is between a poor, decent, honest doctor who does excellent work among the poor and a rotten, cheating, thieving blackguard who might just possibly be a painter of genius. The surgeon argues that the artist must die so that his naïve common-law wife shall never discover what a scoundrel he is. But the real reason he wants the artist to die is so that he can marry the widow.
Tom Burke doesn’t dazzle as the impudent and thoroughly amoral painter should dazzle and in the famous death scene he makes nothing of his moving credo: “I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of colour, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed.”
Nadia Fall’s production needs a sharper pace. The last act, when the widow (Genevieve O’Reilly) and the surgeon (Aden Gillett) come face to face, usually feels superfluous; here, ironically, it has the most drama. Shaw’s plays deserve to be staged more often. John Bull’s Island, for example, hasn’t been staged in London since 1980 and is long overdue for revival.