The Press - Review: The Guinea Pig Club

Fri 12 Oct 2012

Written by Julian Cole

You do wonder what sort of a play this might be, on hearing that it concerns disfigured Second World War airmen and the pioneering surgeon whose work to heal these men, body, soul and sexual libido, took him and them beyond the very edge of what was considered the proper ways of doing things.

And if, at times, you flinch as a badly-burned young man has his damaged body lowered into a brine bath, screaming to the rafters as his bandages are pulled away, well what do you expect when going along to see a play on such a subject?

What you might not anticipate is a moving and funny play which stands as a hymn to the glories of stubborn humanity. Damian Cruden’s production, vividly staged on Joanna Scotcher’s airy hangar of a set, in which an open industrial space fulfils many roles, from hospital ward to local pub, begins briskly as Archibald McIndoe (Graeme Hawley), the pioneering New Zealand-born plastic surgeon, introduces himself as a creature of bumptious brilliance.

McIndoe, in life presumably and certainly as captured in Hawley’s fine and furious performance, does not seem to have been an easy man, obsessed as he was by his own way of doing things.

But that’s the way with greatness. Sir Archibald McIndoe was a great surgeon who gave horribly wounded men their faces back; or an approximation at least.

Deeper than that, he also treated the whole man, dipping deep into their ravaged souls and wrestling them back to some sort of dignity and self-belief.

Two wise decisions rescue this play from what might otherwise have been an earnest or dry documentary-drama. The first is a good and devious strand of plot: McIndoe convinces a young nurse, Alice Harwood (Anna O’Grady, a study in impassioned anxiety), that she should show romantic feelings for pilot Rusty Rushford (Stefano Braschi, full honours, especially for screaming). In return, he will operate on her badly-wounded friend and possible future husband; the poor fellow is never seen, being merely a plot device.

This Faustian pact gives the play an uneasy moral kernel, and the ramifications of that deal spin out to its end.

The other decision is to include music through the enigmatic presence of Frances Day (Sarah Applewood). Is she a nurse; is she really even there? Whatever, she emerges Monroe-like to sing jazz standards and wartime songs, lifting the mood and setting up poignant clashes of tone.

In this, at least in the first half, the play has echoes of Dennis Potter: rarely since The Singing Detective has the pain of damaged skin been soothed by such lovely music.

In a play of conflict, one abrasive point of contact concerns the relationship between McIndoe and Sister O’Donnell (Fiona Dolman, a study in furious constraint), who does not understand his iconoclastic ways.

At times deeply uncomfortable, at others amusing and moving, this play also stands as an examination of how men interact, and Susan Watkins captures tight male suspicion and boyish larks very nicely indeed.

Read the review on The Press website.