THEATER CHRONICLE
253
and large, or charlatans, each with his panacea or trademark, except
for the old doctor, who has lost his belief in medicine. They illustrate
the pathology of medicine, like so many blisters and carbuncles, for
Shaw treats doctoring as a disease. Yet the actors playing these "doc–
tors" felt, apparently, that they had done their duty when they put on
a false mustache or whitened their hair with cornstarch and spoke in a
gruff voice. There was not an attempt, even a feeble one, to suggest
the actual practice of medicine or the habits and mannerisms of live
doctors-the way they rub their hands, for instance, their bustle in
entering a room, the style they have of listening, with the head slightly
cocked. To study a real doctor or doctors would be repugnant to actors
of this sort. They want to have nothing to do with real life. Once I
talked with a "younger" actor who had just been cast in
Detective
Story.
He was worried about his characterization. "Well," I said, "I
suppose you can go around to the police station and spend a little time
with the detectives there." He was horrified by the proposal. That, he
cried, would be imitation. True acting, he explained, came from within
yourself. He did not want to know how live detectives looked and
dressed and walked. It might introduce an impure element.
Assuming he was right, assuming that acting can be achieved by
the armchair method, by sheer introspection, even here the veterans of
The Doctor's Dilemma
failed to put themselves the questions that any
amateur would ask: how would I react, for instance, if someone gave
me some drawings to look at and they turned out to be rather good?
The way Shepperd Strudwick does it, playing the great Sir Colenso
Ridgeon, is to take young Dubedat's drawings to a window and give a
violent start, as if a horse had kicked him, but meaning merely, "This
fellow has talent." When the other doctors, his colleagues, examine the
artist's work in a later scene, they go through the same routine: picture
held at arm's length, galvanic start, picture passed on, to next colleague,
repeat. Sir Colenso has been established as an art-connoisseur, but what
sort of doctors are these others supposed to be, to know art so well that
they are electrified by a single glance at a drawing? No one asked this
question; it was left for the audience to speculate about.
Throughout the play, in fact, the burden of questioning was on
the audience. What sort of man did Shepperd Strudwick imagine Sir
Colenso to be? It was impossible even to guess. He played by fits and
starts, seeking desperately for his laughs, alternately boyish and elderly,
vacillating and decisive; he had evidently never taken a temperature,
felt a pulse, or stood at a bedside. Yet he was supposed to be a great
doctor. Or was he? The audience never knew. Among the lesser doctors,
