WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY ?

Theatre at Baddow

30.01.10

Brian Clark's intriguing play deals, not with euthanasia or assisted suicide, but with the patient's right to choose the time and manner of his death, to wrest control of his own life from the professionals. It first saw the light on television almost forty years ago. Since then it has been revived, adapted and updated.

Wisely, directors Matthew Jones and John Mabey returned to the 70s and the original version. Ken Harrison is centre stage, bedridden and paralysed. Around him the hospital staff bustle and flit. Out of his sight, symmetrically behind him, office space in a décor of anonymous pastel.

Roger Saddington gave a quietly assured reading of the stricken sculptor, wise-cracking with the pretty Junior Nurse [Vicky Wright], roused to fury by the inveterate optimist Mrs Boyle [Annette Michaels]. The end of their scene together was one of the strongest moments for me, in a production that did not always engage the audience in this perennially relevant debate.

But this is by no means a one-man show. A dozen other characters join Ken on his quest to die with dignity. Helen Quigley was the Sister with the heart of stainless steel, with Caroline Wright as the sympathetic young doctor, and Joanna Poole as Miss Kershaw, the barrister who speaks for Ken in the “courtroom”.

Two key characters were John, the orderly, who perhaps stands for the love of life that Ken has lost, played here with a cheeky cynicism by Iain Miller, and Emerson, the omniscient consultant who never doubts for a moment that valium is the answer, played with aplomb by Robert Bastian. A performance which was all the stronger for showing compassion, and vulnerability, towards the end.

photograph: David Pridmore