This is not a tragicomedy. It is not located somewhere between the tragic and comic poles, at least not intentionally. Bernard Shaw (although he called it a comedy) seems to have set out to write, not a work that oscillated between the two, but rather one that was both at once. The major fault of Nadia Fall’s production is to trust that the play can do this. It can’t, and so both play and production fall between two stools.
    
Broadly speaking, there are at least two plays going on here. There is the broad character comedy inhabited by most of the medical figures, each blustering away about his own pet approach, whether it be “stimulating the phagocytes” or surgically removing the “nuciform sac”. In these roles, the actors – including revered NT names such as David Calder and Malcolm Sinclair – are none too concerned about making their characters plausible. Then there are the central trio: the physician Sir Colenso Ridgeon, who falls in love with Jennifer Dubedat when she petitions him to cure the tuberculosis of her husband Louis, who turns out to be both a divinely talented artist and an infernally selfish, amoral blackguard. In these roles Aden Gillett, Genevieve O’Reilly and Tom Burke respectively play in a vein which is both much more naturalistic and much more elevated.
    
And why at least two plays? Because each of these three principals seems to have decided that they are the core and viewpoint character. True, Burke enjoys a fairly rollicking Act Three, in which he twits the priggish moralising of the doctors in a characteristically Shavian way, but in the following act he is predominantly back to tragic earnestness on his deathbed. And yet even here the jokes keep popping out, and Fall’s direction can reconcile neither the differing strains of writing nor the divergent approaches to characterisation. Even the central inspiration for the play, which is especially topical now – the proposition that private medicine will always choose whom it treats based on profit or profile rather than on either need or desert – is in danger of vanishing beneath the deplorable contemporary bias against expertise, if we mis-infer from these assorted nonsenses that all doctors are quacks. Shaw needs to have energy of performance properly marshalled along with emotional and above all intellectual comprehension; it simply does not happen here.
     
Written for the Financial Times.