THEATRE REVIEW: THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA
10 Jul'10

Shaw's 'Doctor's Dilemma' sketchy

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE - Despite biblical injunctions against it -- judge not, lest ye be judged, or words to that effect -- most of us pass judgment on those with whom we share the planet on a regular basis. Indeed, in a world where the personal grows daily more public, judging others has become so popular that it's all but an international sport on a par with soccer.

But what if, in judging others, we were to be given the power of life and death over those we judged? That is, in fact, the very dilemma at the heart of THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA, a 1906 play from the pen of the great Bernard Shaw that, in its day, challenged the way the world looked at doctors and the practice of medicine. A new production of THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA, the fourth in the Shaw Festival's history, opened here on the stage of the Festival Theatre Friday.

Colenso Ridgeon, played here by Patrick Galligan, is the doctor in question, a medical doctor whose success in treating tuberculosis in a day before not only antibiotics, but government healthcare, has led to his recent knighting. But Sir Colenso and his friends have barely begun to celebrate his peerage when he is rather forcibly introduced to a lovely young woman with a problem.

She is Jennifer Dubedat, played here by Krista Colosimo, and she is married to a promising young artist, Louis Dubedat (Jonathan Gould), who just happens to be suffering from tuberculosis. And he will surely die without competent medical intervention of the kind Ridgeon can deliver.

But though Ridgeon is struck not only by the beauty, but by the humanity of the lovely Mrs. Dubedat, he is less than impressed with her ailing husband, a man who operates on a moral code that Ridgeon most definitely finds wanting. So, with only one space left in his treatment program, Ridgeon opts to treat an ailing professional colleague rather than the artist -- and with tragic results.

This being a Shaw play, it is of course, a talky affair, as the great man saddles up several of his favourite socio-political hobby horses and all but rides them into the ground. But for all its sermonizing, it is still a good play -- far better, in fact, than this production, reviewed here in final preview, would suggest. Sadly, under the direction of Morris Panych, with sets by Ken MacDonald and costumes by Charlotte Dean, it emerges as far less than the sum of all its parts.

That's thanks in no small part to a set that dwarfs the cast at almost every turn, overshadowing them with massive blow-ups of X-rays and tuberculosis bacilli, lest we forget this is a medical world. Worse, rather than making every effort to underscore the deep social resonance of what Krista Colosimo Shaw has to say (and perhaps feeling overburdened by a script that suggests, in this day and age, that an audience should actually care about the fate of a single artist), Panych does everything he can to diminish the playwright's arguments instead.

Not only does he encourage Galligan in the title role to reprise a performance that is rapidly becoming formulaic, he further exacerbates the imbalance he has created by encouraging Gould to wallow in a characterization of Dubedat that is, at best, sketchy and one dimensional. Meanwhile, accents from a supporting cast that includes Thom Marriott, Catherine McGregor, Michael Ball, Patrick McManus, Ric Reid and others seem to be indiscriminately applied -- with a paint knife. Worst of all, from the Rolling Stones' music with which he peppers the production to set changes that pivot around the tying of tie -- admittedly, no mean feat -- Panych telegraphs to his audience that he's not really taking this play seriously.

And if he doesn't, we can't.