Critical Comment for Dec 05
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about illness. Not because it’s the season of snuffles and flu but because of an extraordinary combination of circumstances. On one November day, I found myself going to my National Health physio for treatment of critics’ knee, talking to Sir John Mortimer about young dramatists’ morbid preoccupation with sickness and attending the hilarious Almeida production of Molière’s The Hypochondriac. At the end of a long day, it hit me that we now revere illness. What we have lost is Molière’s capacity for cleansing laughter at the expense of ourselves and the medical profession.
Sickness, you may say, is no joking matter, especially when it affects us or our loved ones. But my conversation with John Mortimer occurred in the context of having just read 17 new plays for the Pearson Playwrights’ Scheme. This, I should explain, is a brilliant scheme that offers bursaries of £6,500 to promising young writers; over the past 30 years, there’s hardly a playwright of note who hasn’t benefited from it. But Sir John, who chairs the panel that makes the awards, was talking about the prevailing gloom of this year’s entries.
“Everyone,” he said, “seems to be writing about their private physical or psychological ailments. One longs for writers to get out of their rooms and engage with the world at large.” Although there are some fine plays within the batch, I couldn’t help but agree.
In contrast, going that evening to The Hypochondriac was a spiritual and physical tonic. Here is a play that, in Richard Bean’s lewdly lavatorial new version, makes endless jokes about exploitative quacks and the self-obsession of the sick. Henry Goodman’s Argan fusses over his faeces, squats on a commodious commode and subjects himself to endless anal indignities. Even the play’s scatalogical punning is infectious. Given its alienated hero’s preoccupation with his bowel-movements, I wondered whether it shouldn’t be re-titled An Enema of the People – I suppressed the mischievous desire to end my review by saying “This one will run and run.”
You may argue this simply shows my own childishness and English delight in bodily functions, but I think there is a larger point at stake. Molière, although a dying man himself, viewed his hypochondriac hero objectively. Modern dramatists, in contrast, treat any form of sickness with subjective reverence. In this, they reflect society at large. We are conditioned by newspapers, advertising and TV to treat our bodies as private temples, to dwell on our minor ailments and to seek out bizarre remedies. Every man today is his own Argan, driven by self-obsession and credulously worshipping orthodox or alternative medicine.
What we lack are plays that satirise our health fixation or the medical profession at large. Shaw, of course, was the great exemplar and a constant scourge of quacks and fixers. The Doctor’s Dilemma, although rarely seen today, is a very funny account of medical practitioners’ belief in single cure-alls. “There is at bottom,” booms Shaw’s Bloomfield Bonington, “only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases and that is to stimulate the phagocytes.” While Shaw’s arguments in his preface against vaccination may have dated, those against vivisection seem as timely as ever in the era of animal rights’ protests.
Of living dramatists, only Peter Nichols has dared to challenge medical orthodoxies and even wring dark humour out of suffering. As proved in its recent West End revival, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg is one of the greatest plays of the post-war era. It’s full of compassion for the two parents struggling to bring up a handicapped child. At the same time, it avoids penny-in-the-slot pathos. Bri and Sheila survive, as Nichols knows all too well, only through anaesthetising humour; one of their targets is an Austrian paediatrician who resorts to elaborate metaphors about switchboards to explain their child’s damaged brain.
Nichols is in the great tradition of Molière and Shaw: a dramatist unafraid to move wild laughter in the throat of death. But everyone seems to have forgotten about a play Nichols wrote in 1969, The National Health, which became one of the big hits of the Olivier regime at the Old Vic. A hospital ward, desperately overstretched and kept functioning largely by immigrant staff, becomes a metaphor for modern Britain. A manipulative orderly, originally played by Jim Dale, suggests “there’s always something bent about the healing arts”. Scenes from medical soaps eventually merge with reality – a brilliantly prescient observation since, I’m convinced, doctors and nurses now model themselves on characters from Casualty and Holby City.
Like his famous forebears, Nichols deals with the ethics of medicine while making us laugh. But where are his successors? Today, largely influenced by American drama, navel-gazing dramatists surround any form of sickness with an aura of sanctity. If, as Susan Sontag suggested, illness is a metaphor, then it has become one for the privatised nature of experience.
What I crave are big, expansive plays that treat medical pieties with the same scepticism they would religious platitudes or political hypocrisies. Also plays that view professional invalids with the same purgative sanity as Molière. If anyone were to write a play like The Hypochondriac today, you can be sure of one thing – Argan, studying his own stool with microscopic intensity, would be seen not as a near-madman but as a revered role-model.