The Doctor's Dilemma — 100 years on

Mike Pringle

On Monday 20 November there was a reading of Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma at the Royal College of Physicians, London, to mark the centenary of its first performance. When I was flattered into agreeing to take part, I had heard of it and even quoted from it; but I had never read it or been to a performance.

On getting the play through Amazon, my first impression was of timelessness. The play addresses, through absurdity and great humour, many of our current dilemmas in medicine. In particular, the central conundrum concerns rationing. A recently knighted physician has a full ward of consumptive patients, all selected on the basis of their worthiness for the new ‘effective’ treatment.

Then two new cases of tuberculosis present themselves. The first is a promising artist, with a very attractive wife, but who proves to be an amoral scoundrel; and the second a failed GP who is steady and reliable. Which one should be squeezed into the ward?

Each doctor has his preferred treatments, from an operation to remove a fictional organ (the nuciform sac), anti-toxins and inoculations, to a pound of ripe greengages half an hour before lunch. Through twists and turns in which senior medical men first vie to treat the artist, and then compete to be the first to abandon him, Shaw explores all the vanities of the medical profession. This includes the internecine warfare in which physicians and surgeons sneer at GPs, physicians denigrate surgeons, and all despise their patients — good cynical stuff that might grace a similar play today.

When I received the adapted version, the play had been greatly improved by Michael O'Donnell's edit, except that he had expunged my character, a rather smug anti-Semitic GP. I was then cast as a very elderly and wise Irish physician who has seen it all before. I read my role assiduously and attended two rehearsals (with no discernable benefit from either of them).

Then, with a week to go, the casting error was realised — it was stretching credulity that I was several decades older than Sir Michael Rawlins who was the male lead — and I suddenly became Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, the Queen's physician. BB, as he is known, ‘radiates an enormous self-satisfaction’ who is ‘considered, scientifically, a colossal humbug’. I had sufficient insight to detect a smidgen of type casting.

But perhaps I was not alone. Jim Johnson was cast as the obnoxious surgeon; Sir Liam Donaldson as the infected, failed GP who goes on to be a medical officer of health after his cure; Niall Dickson as the illiterate newspaper man; Evan Harris as the dishonest artist; and Sally Davies as a cantankerous housekeeper. Far be it from me to suggest that any of these were also typecast.

And the performance? It was, I think, characterised by a raw energy and passion that compensated for the lack of preparation and, frankly, ability. Although several cast members, notably Fiona Godlee as the artist's scrumptious wife, seemed to have a glimmering of acting talent. As for myself, I disguised my ineptitude under a miasma of over-acting. It seemed the only way.