Medicine Men
THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA. By George Bernard Shaw. (Saville.) AT the time of the Shaw centenary I thought of any number of Shaiv's plays which could be revived with success in the West End, provided they were intelligently cast. The Doctor's Dilemma was not one of them; "I feared it ,might have dated. Dated! It is almost pain- fully up to date. Change a word here and there—delete opsonin and the nuciform sac: substitute cortisone and the slipped disc—and we are in 1956. It will presumably still be as fresh in 1976. And it remains extremely funny. Do some of the doctors overplay? Yes : and who would blame them? Lewis Casson and Laurence Hardy arc excellent; and Michael Hordern's entertaining Bloomfield Bonington is less good only because it . is a little too contrived.
It seems almost ungracious to criticise these Saville revivals; but they still show odd weak- nesses in casting. Ann Todd as Mrs. Dubedat —really! And Paul Daneman is no Dubedat, either. The trouble is that the play flounders in its later stages unless the Dubedats can gain our sympathy, in spite of the silliness of one and the rascality of the other. But though Paul Daneman could not command the artless selfishness of Dubedat, he did at least carry off his final scene so that it was only mildly tedious, instead of (as it has always been when I have seen the play before) actively embarrassing. The production, apart from a few attempts to create emotion where none was required (there seemed to be a marked reluctance to let the curtain fall at the end of scenes), was suitably unobtrusive; it let Shaw speak for himself; and how delightful his
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