The Doctor's Dilemma, Part 2

I finished listening to Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma, which ended up being great fun (it started out that way as well). It seems that the play was conventionally staged and merely recorded for radio; either this, or the actors engaged in a moderate amount of action. The giveaway is a scene in which one of the doctors is asking the artist if the latter can repay money that the former has lent. The audience began laughing as the artist apparently searched futilely through his pockets for money (a very non radiogenic scene).

The plot of the satirical play concerns several doctors, each of whom seems to be more pompous and yet less medically apt than the last. They each have been knighted for supposedly groundbreaking scientific advances, all of which are clearly ineffective at best, and detrimental to patients' health at worst. They are good natured enough, however. The central character, Sir Colenso Ridgeon, has just been knighted for his advances in immunology, and the play introduces the other doctors who have come to congratulate him. As some of these well-wishers are departing, a woman comes in to plead with Ridgeon to help her tubercular husband Louis Dubedat. Ridgeon says he is full up with patients and cannot possibly take another, unless Mrs. Dubedat can convince him that her husband is worth saving. Mrs. Dubedat then shows Sir Colenso a drawing of herself that her husband has done, and whether he admires more its apparent artistic merit or its image of the beautiful young wife, Sir Colenso agrees that Louis is, indeed, worth saving. This is good news for the Dubedats but bad news for a doctor friend of Sir Colenso's, the single non-knighted visitor, who is a failure because he is too good and honest to join the medical swindle in which his colleagues have happily immersed themselves.

Sir Colenso's choice to save the genius artist due to his contribution to society seems sound, until we meet Louis. In fact, before an audience is introduced to him, we hear the doctors' relation of their first meeting with the young artist, who has stolen something or borrowed money from each during the course of their dinner. Louis, it turns out, is a scoundrel, though a clever and talented one. When he appears on stage, confronted by the doctors who have now gotten a good read of his character, his sophistry almost convinces us that the true artist is justified in whatever anti-social actions he undertakes. Almost. Indeed, the doctors, who are as likely to kill their patients as to save them, seem to be in no moral position to condemn Louis for profiting by trickery. Here seems to be the typical Shavian move (as far as I can gather it from having seen or heard only two plays), to force the audience to define their own version of morality in the midst of an apparent moral vacuum. To complicate this dilemma further, Sir Colenso has fallen in love with Mrs. Dubedat and decides that he will save his good doctor friend and pass the artist off to a colleague, whose quack cure will certainly kill Mr. Dubedat. In the end, Dubedat dies, but Mrs. Dubedat marries another man, and her late husband has the last laugh.

The play introduces an interesting mix of Victorian atmosphere (the old doctors are clearly the old Victorian guard, and the scene of Dubedat's "beautiful" death has a highly Victorian coloring) and modernist moral ambiguity.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, this production worked very well on radio. The characters' personalities are revealed perfectly through their voices (although Mrs. Dubedat, whose lush voice at first provides a pleasant illustration of her sensuous beauty, becomes distractingly maudlin at times), and the mode of the play--a moral argument between conflicting perspectives--is well suited to radio's bent for controversy and debate.