Playing God: Interpreting The Doctor’s Dilemma Set Design at Shaw Festival 2010

Over a century ago, when Bernard Shaw wrote The Doctor’s Dilemma in 1906, England’s health care was terrifyingly primitive. If one had the misfortune of falling ill during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, essentially, one had the choice of two treatment options. The sufferer could either turn to the local druggist to purchase an expensive patent medicine, of which the ingredients largely comprised of opiates or alcohol and were consequently addictive; or, the patient could visit the equally costly doctor and receive a diagnosis which often led to a treatment involving sharp knives, bleeding, and the prescribing of more addictive drugs. Both treatment options and professions claimed they could cure anything and everything, and save a man from his impending last rites. Bernard Shaw apparently found these claims as quacked as his contemporary audiences as his comedy, The Doctor’s Dilemma, bestows an ironic portrayal of the attempts of the period’s medical professionals’ to play God. This biblical irony which Shaw so wittily scribed could not have been depicted more clearly than through Ken MacDonald’s set design. In particular, MacDonald’s design renditions of Christian symbolism became further pronounced when combined with director Morris Panych’s blocking choices and Shaw’s text.

There exist several references in the Bible suggesting a theme of left versus right holding significance within the Christian faith. The right side is generally symbolized as the side of good and righteousness, whilst the left is characterized as perverse and corrupt. Expanding upon this theme in the first act, MacDonald implemented three larger-than-life x-ray portraits to transform the entire stage into an aesthetic depiction of the ...

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..., his Last Supper portrayal, and his allusion of the Original Sin, portrayed an acute question of where does God’s work end, and the doctor’s begin? In our contemporary society where cloning, euthanasia, abortion, and artificial insemination are gaining social popularity and support, the divide between the roles of the supernatural and that of medical science becomes increasingly unclear. Let’s just hope any dilemmas over present medical morality will always contain egalitarian and humanistic principals.

Works Cited

Matthew 25:31-46 and Matthew 6: 3

"The Human Body: An Orientation." http://www.augustatech.edu/anatomy/chapter%201.html (accessed 23 Aug 2010).

Ken MacDonald. "Designer's Notes." The Doctor's Dilemma, 2010.

"Analysis of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night ." 2010.http://www.lifeofvangogh.com/analysis-starry-night.html (accessed 23 Aug 2010).