A dazzling night at the theatre

WIT

Royal Exchange Theatre, to February 13

YOU can see why Margaret Edson’s short (100 minutes, no interval) and sometimes harrowing play won several prizes, including a Pulitzer, when first seen 16 years ago.


Tom Stoppard-like, the text sets the complexity of intellectual wit against the simplicity of human kindness; the gentle callousness of members of the medical profession against the humane affection of nursing staff; the power of love and kindness over words, and so on.

And it doesn’t hurt that it has a bravura central role.

In other words, it’s a rare, dazzling night at the theatre, one that gets an equally dazzling starring performance from Julie Hesmondhalgh.

The Royal Exchange’s production is sparse and sleek. Hesmondhalgh is Vivian Bearing, an English professor specialisiing in the works of metaphysical poet John Donne, a writer who “made Shakespeare sound like a greetings card writer”. Aloof, unmarried and unloved at 50, Bearing lives for her studies, teasing out the meanings in the multi-layered works of the 16th century writer.

But when she is diagnosed with a stage four ovarian cancer, doctors — one of whom thinks cancer is “awesome” — encourage her into a brutal chemotherapy regime and she begins to understand there are more important things in life than work, particularly work that brings no comfort or joy when it matters.

Edson’s play takes a slightly sentimental view of life, but she can’t be faulted for running with it and walking a line that never descends into melodrama.

Raz Shaw’s production generally makes the doctors (Tom Hodgkins and Esh Alladi) an unfeeling, slightly comic pair, so much so it detracts from the honesty of the central performance.

It is made clear to us that their treatment is more research project than cure and the patient is a guinea pig.

In fact doctors aren’t usually “unfeeling” but are deliberately professionally distant; here they use their empathy tuition without actually adding any empathy.

The play is also spoiled slightly for me (Edson’s fault) by its ending: a “resuscitation of the patient” panic (followed by Hesmondhalgh metaphysically walking into the light as unclothed as the day she walked out of it).

The scene before this would be the more fitting end.

Bearing’s old professor visits as she lays dying and what comforts most isn’t her life’s work but the only book the prof has to hand — Margaret Brown’s “The Runaway Bunny”, bought for her great-grandson. Comfort in simplicity.