Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
Matters of life and death are an everyday experience
for Daniel Pearce, the doctor at the centre of Allan Cubitt’s little-seen 1991
play, in which the good doctor must face up to his own mortality. As all the
women in his life – his lover, Jane, sister, Ruth and nurse, Kate – flock to
his bedside, Pearce falls down a Hogarthian rabbit hole inspired by the
painting that hangs on the stairwell of St Bart’s Hospital, and which gives the
play its title. The delirium that ensues throws up a vivid scenario in which
Pearce poses as Christ for Hogarth’s painting, while his real-life loved ones
are reinvented as a parade of eighteenth century good-time girls and fops. It
takes more earthbound associations with a bottle of Polish vodka provided by
Callum Douglas’ hospital porter Simon and a meeting with a former patient,
however, to put Pearce’s priorities into harsh perspective.
The play marked the first sighting of Cubitt, who
rapidly moved into television, penning Prime Suspect 2. He is best known these
days for creating the Gillian Anderson-led psychological cop drama, The Fall. Perhaps
tellingly, The Pool of Bethesda bears a superficial, if non-musical resemblance
to Dennis Potter’s hospital-set TV fantasia, The Singing Detective, which
appeared five years before Cubitt’s play.
Mark Thomson’s production is performed by final year
BA acting students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, who get to grips
with a heap of first-world grown-up stuff, which they play with a steely
intelligence. Both Edward Soper as Pearce and Paula Nugent as Jane are unafraid
to heighten their characters flaws as much as their virtues in a work where all
of the women seem biblically devoted to Pearce in a dramatic think-piece on
faith, healing, love and loss.
The Herald, May 21st 2018
ends
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