Just What The Doctor Ordered

Amazing how potent old Bernard Shaw remains. Almost a century after he wrote off medical science as a respectable branch of witch-craft and doctors as near charlatans, Shaw and this satirical romance speak with all the topicality of today's newspaper head-lines: When financial and medical resources are scarce, how should doctors decide which patients will benefit from life-saving treatment? What can protect us from corrupt medical men putting their own interests first? How can we ignorant lay-people resist doctors dazzling us with omniscience.

The questions come with provocative forcefulness in Michael Grandage's production, which makes suave mockery of Edwardian Harley Street consultants, dressed in morning suits and wearing a smart cut of airs and graces. Christopher Oram's set with its double mahogany doors, antique conference table and chairs discreetly reeks of opulence. So too do the consultants, arriving to congratulate Ian McDiarmid's preening Colenso Ridgeon on his knighthood. Tony Britton's Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, in turquoise waist-coat and pink carnation, looks expensive enough to steal for his clothes alone.

Shaw makes jubiliant fun of these specialists, each airily convinced he can beat off the most sophisticated diseases and germs with his own brilliant curative. And of them all, Britton's old Sir Ralph, who effortlessly scales the heights of benevolent smugness from where he silkily dismisses surgery as "only manual labour", is quite the funniest. The situation is not that absurd, even from today's perspective when money can buy you the consultant reckoned to have the most magic touch.

But then the play takes a serious turn to the matter of medical ethics. Victoria Hamilton's pretty little Jennifer Dubedat, behaving like a sixth-form school girl who has heard sex appeal should be applied discreetly to men over 40, bares her entire heart. She wants Sir Colenso, who has a cure for TB, to save her dying consumptive artist-husband, Louis. McDiarmid's Ridgeon, the most compelling, natural performance I have seen from him, emanates the sly, dry craftiness of a fox who knows a secret way into the hen-house.

Smitten by Jennifer but not deigning to show it, Ridgeon must submit his feelings to the question of medical morality. He will decide whether to allow his last hospital place to the artist Louis or to a humble GP of his acquaintance. The question is intriguingly complicated, because Louis turns out to be an impressive artist, who believes his genius entitles him to behave like an anarchist with an alley cat's morals. Unfortunately, though, the dilemma of the title is skimped, and Sir Colenso's passion fatally ensures Louis is dispatched to Sir Ralph's hopeless care.

Grandage's production, despite one or two gabbled, strident performances, hits the right notes. Civilised decorum masks the dark dealings of McDiarmid's wicked Sir Colenso. But Louis whom James Callis invests with oodles of shameless narcissism, succumbs to a deathbed scene of creaky, half-hearted melodramatics, while Miss Hamilton's distress blows fairly cool. It's in her final encounter with Sir Colenso that this riveting study of flawed idealists reaches its thoroughly cynical, and modern, resolution.

The Doctor's Dilemma