The Doctor and the Devils

From Dylan Thomas, privately the spirit of extravagance, there might have been expected at least one big, rich, interesting failure; the Poets' Theatre has gratified this expectation by presenting the world premiere of The Doctor and the Devils. In it Thomas takes on the problem of the existence in a comfortable and cultured city of the vilest depths of misery and degradation, and the question of whether a good end can justify any means. The first of these great issues is largely muffled in Dickensian-Hogarthian picturesqueness for the slums, and clumsy, over-literary, rhetorical prose for the cultured quarters. The second problem, once stated, is largely ignored.

But if The Doctor and the Devils is an artistic, or at least a philosophic, failure, it is still an important event. (What I mean is, go and see it.) For Thomas, the most intensely personal of writers, it was a bold--and unique--departure into objectivity. It has none of his trademarks: it is neither florid nor lyrical nor autobiographical; not even Welsh. By rights, such a first experiment should be an unplayable mess, hinting vaguely at possible successes if the new craft could be mastered. But, amazingly, it is alive and viable, and occasion to mourn the greatness of the plays that must surely have died unwritten with their author.

More immediately, it is an excellent and exciting melodrama--melodrama because its kicks stem directly and indirectly from a fast, explosive, and physical series of crises. The plot was taken from a veritable mine of visceral sensation: the case of the body-snatchers Burke and Hare, as told in a story by Donald Taylor. In the last century, it seems, the teachers of anatomy in Edinburgh were forced to deal with "resurrectionists" for the dissection subjects they needed. Two of these "vicious human vermin of the gutters of the city" find it more convenient to murder than to dig up their stock in trade ready-killed, and familiar faces begin to show up on the dissecting tables, faces that had been seen alive, laughing and talking, a few hours previously.

Obviously this is a situation for Boris Karloff; perhaps, looked at differently, one for the Marx Brothers. It serves Thomas' purposes because of what has been made of the character of the doctor who receives the bodies: a man of great stature, at once a cold misanthrope and a burning fanatic in the cause of human amelioration, with the necessity raging inside him to alienate the spiritually fat-bottomed of the universe (that is, most of us) by telling unpleasant truths.

Doctor Rock was probably intended as a tragic figure; he fails of tragic stature partly because Thomas has made him often willfully nasty, less superhuman than inhuman. The scenes with his pretty young paragon of a wife, which were probably supposed to loosen him up, are a total loss, as the young lady has no qualities except loyalty, humility, and a talent for making her husband talk in passionate puerilities.

Nevertheless, the character is enough of a success to prove that great men can suffer with greater subtlety and complexity, and no less intensity, than the clods out of which modern plays are frequently heaped up. Thomas' words sometimes cast a glow, a light never seen on land or sea, even on the murderers (though never on the murders); but it is Doctor Rock's reaction, in the scene where before a phantom audience he lectures on the dissection of the human conscience, that proves that melodrama can be used for purposes of poetry.

Some day, perhaps, there will be a great production of The Doctor and the Devils, one that will make the most of its beauties, since not much can be done to minimize its faults. It would be interesting to see what Frederic March or Sir John Gielgud could do with the leading role; any lesser actor would be over-parted. Robert A. Brooks, who takes the part at Kresge, has the proper dignity of bearing, and makes a noble stage figure. If he is insufficiently heroic, if he does not project the proper intensity of fanaticism, if he is not completely at home with the witty Doctor's epigrams, still he has moments of great effectiveness. Earle Edgerton and Dean Gitter play the murderers with unflagging grim conviction, though they do not capitalize on the grotesque idiosyncrasies that Thomas outlined for them in the published script, and seem as a result almost interchangeable. The rest of the cast ranges from adequate to awful.

The Doctor and the Devils was written as a movie script; the story is told in one hundred and forty-one scenes in the printed text, some lasting only a moment. Thomas sent his hypothetical cameraman up and down the streets of a whole city; Joseph Everingham, the adapter, Stephen Aaron, the director, and Webster Lithgow, the designer, have had to cram all this onto the double stage at Kresge. They have wisely stuck close to Thomas' original, and, having attempted the impossible, brought it off better than might have been expected.

Mr. Aaron's slum scenes, while effective, have an air of deja vu about them, and, at least at the dress rehearsal Lattended, the murders were sadly disappointing. More work may have been done on the show since then, but The Doctor and the Devils would be out of place on the stage even in the best of circumstances. It is a movie script. Its dozens of locales need dozens of settings; its fades and cuts and dissolves must be quicker and cleaner than the be-tiptoed blackouts that are necessary in the theatre. Much of the work's quality is lost in this production--but enough remains, including an intrinsic vitality that eludes analysis but not praise. Since movie-makers with taste and imagination are rarer than flatchested starlets, let us be grateful to the Poets'.