A Country Doctor is a play which prompts questions. But mostly, given that this is an adaptation of the Kafka short story, the question is why?, or, more accurately, what the hell is going on? The plot itself – far though it is from being able to convey what exactly the play involves – consists of a doctor trying to treat a sick boy, first in his attempt to find horses to reach him, then in his increasingly strange and dark meeting with the boy and his family.
Perhaps it is strange, given the remarkably un-theatrical nature of the original – a six-page short story with very little dialogue or concrete characterisation – that the play even seems to find a home onstage. But this is largely a result of the confident writing of Henry Little and the work of John Evans and Nathaniel Whitfield on lighting, sound and set design. The bareness of the staging has a curiously complementary relationship with the richness of the language, as exemplified by the doctor’s amazed description of the apparently monstrous horses as he gazes on a shadow puppet projected on the wall by a handheld torch. What might otherwise have seemed the mark of the standard under-budgeted student production, feels eerie and disconcerting in the unadorned and intimate black space of the Burton Taylor.
Things take a turn for the darker when the doctor reaches the sick boy’s home. A crate which had been a carriage is upturned and becomes the boy’s bed, and there is a real sense of the play turning inside out as it meanders its way through the odd and basically insensible dialogue and action. Characters chant, they laugh hysterically, they scream, they attack each other, they collapse, and the play plays on. Rum is drunk, blood is split, prayers are said, and the play plays on.
‘The play plays on’ might well sum up the play: of course the audience can have no idea what’s going on, and neither does the eponymous doctor. Alex Wilson does a solid job of portraying his attempts, along with the audience, to keep up with what is happening around him, despite apparently not expecting any of it. A few stumbles, and some problems reflecting the striking metres of the dialogue, are slight, though frequently noticeable, blemishes on otherwise good performances. The characters are all largely stock-figures, and the cast on the whole do a fine job of treading the line between the real and the meaningless. The abrupt changes from dialogue to more ‘atmospheric’ interludes – all whispered chants and fevered poking – are particularly well executed, sweeping the viewer along in a frenzy or a lull.
The promotional material of A Country Doctor promised great things: a ‘unique and vivid experience’ that would ‘stretch the studio open.’ Does it deliver on its promises? Largely, yes. Weaknesses in technicalities are readily subsumed by the overall experience of watching the play, which is certainly an experience, however hard to pin down and follow.
THREE AND A HALF STARS
