The Guardian - Review: The Guinea Pig Club

Fri 19 Oct 2012

Written by Alfred Hickling

The Guinea Pig Club was an exclusive drinking society, but it's hard to imagine anyone would actually want to qualify for membership. The entry requirement was that you had to have been a Battle of Britain pilot with extensive burns injuries who had been operated on by the pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe. McIndoe, originally from New Zealand, was notable for developing the philosophy that the patients' psyche, as much as their physiognomy, needed to be rebuilt: "For what good is a face without a man – a whole man?" And though life on McIndoe's ward wasn't exactly a party, he at least endeavoured to ensure his patients had a good time, introducing a piano and a beer keg from which they could help themselves.

Susan Watkins's play sardonically combines hard medical fact with jaunty melodies from the period to create what, in its most effective moments, feels uncannily like a lost work of Dennis Potter. There's nothing quite like the spectacle of a pilot having pieces of charred gauntlet removed from his hands to the accompaniment of Cole Porter's It's De-Lovely to illustrate the atrocious consequences of conflict.

Damian Cruden's production expertly recreates the camaraderie of the ward, though Graeme Hawley's McIndoe emerges as a deeply conflicted character – a caustic Kiwi whose fondness for mind games and whose unassailable assessment of his own brilliance bring to mind a wartime precursor of Hugh Laurie's Gregory House. The telling fact that one of the wounded veterans prefers to speak through a ventriloquist's dummy reinforces the suggestion that McIndoe enjoyed playing the puppetmaster as much as the plastic surgeon. Yet the fact that the surviving members of the Guinea Pig Club still meet today is testament to an undeniable, if somewhat tormented, genius.

Read on The Guardian Website

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/oct/18/the-guinea-pig-club-review?newsfeed=true