REVIEW: Whose Life Is It Anyway, People's Theatre
A matter of life and death
Ken Harrison is in hospital and that makes him a patient. But to what extent is ‘Mr Harrison’ – as he’s known to the medics whose job it is to take care of him – a person?
This seems to lie at the nub of Brian Clark’s play which first aired on TV in 1972 and was then rejigged for the stage (it won an Olivier award in the West End and Tom Conti, as Ken, won a Tony for its Broadway run).
What’s striking is that it seems so fresh.
OK, there’s a faint whiff of Doctor in the House (1960s sit com) in some of the lighter exchanges, but the issues it deals with are alive and well and surfaced in the prolonged debate over the assisted dying bill that many still want to see on the statute books.
That bill, should it have gone through, wouldn’t have helped Ken, since it would have enabled terminally ill adults with no more than six months to live to request help to end their lives.
Ken is in hospital because he was in a terrible road accident.
Having received the best possible care from highly qualified and dedicated medical staff, his dreadful physical wounds have healed – except for the one that never will.
Ken is paralysed below the neck. The hospital can do no more for him. Not being an old man, he could live for many years but always reliant on the assistance of others. The prospect appals him.
Medical staff offer compensatory nuggets, saying he might be surprised by the things he finds he can do. They weigh in with their experience. They’ve seen people in similar situations adapt.
Hapless occupational therapist Mrs Boyle (Kristin Clawson) suggests that with the right gadgets he might yet read and write – and gets sent away with a noisy flea in her ear.
Ken, believing himself as good as dead, wants to die – and that, of course, runs counter to everything a hospital stands for. At the mercy of all this first rate care, what Ken craves is agency – the right to choose and be listened to.
It’s driving him nuts – which, in a riff on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, means he can be deemed not of sound mind and therefore not fit to decide things for himself.
This play sounds like the toughest of tough watches but it really isn’t.
The dialogue is sparkling and succinct, the issues absorbing, and with the focus on Ken’s hospital bed, much depends on a sparkling central performance from the neck up.
Many actors turned down the role before Tom Conti shone in it and here Jack Thompson is absolutely brilliant, giving us a complete sense of Ken’s appealing personality, intellect and perceptiveness.
Despite everything, he is so… alive. That’s the tragedy. He displays a blunt honesty lacking almost everywhere else.
At every turn, he can see what’s going on. Constantly he turns the tables on the medics – on austerely professional Dr Emerson (terrific performance from Pete McAndrew), on anguished Dr Scott (Abbie Martin, likewise) and on matronly Sister Anderson (Rye Mattick).
He senses their embarrassment at their inability to get him on his feet again. Their own helplessness disturbs them and, as if to muffle it, they sedate Ken, once against his will.
Only with chirpy student nurse Kay Sadler (Annie Elizabeth Cairns) and young ward orderly John (Peter Dawson) can he feel wholly human, flirting, joking and having moments of fun away from starchy professionalism.
In the end he finds a way of wresting matters into his own hands – and it comes down to the decision of a judge (a magisterial People’s appearance by Chris Goulding) to settle matters.
Director Lauren Allison and all the cast and creative team deliver a memorable and thought-provoking production that gets to the heart of what it is to be human.
Whose Life Is It Anyway? runs until Saturday, May 16 in the studio theatre. Tickets from the People’s Theatre website.