“Whilst my physicians by their love are grown/ Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie/ Flat on this bed...” So wrote John Donne (1572-1631) in one of his Holy Sonnets. These are the special subject of the US university professor Dr Vivian Bearing, who, as she lies flat on her hospital bed, examined by surrounding medics, tells the audience: “They read me like a book. Once I did the teaching, now I am taught.” Meanwhile, a doctor describes her to his students: “A significant part of the tumour was de-bulked... Left, right ovaries. Fallopian tubes...”
“I feel right at home,” says Vivian. “It’s just like a graduate seminar.” And not just because of the shared teaching angle – as we see later, Vivian has been as oblivious to her students’ sensitivities as the doctors are to hers. For some people, kindness also has to be learned.
Vivian, dressed in hospital gown and a baseball cap to hide her baldness, is talking us through her eight months of “full-force” experimental treatment for an aggressive cancer. She guides us through a flow of short, swift scenes, flitting between present and past, leading to a final conclusion. “It’s not my intention to give away the plot,” Vivian announces at the outset, “but I think I die at the end.” That “I think” raises a doubt and a question: what is the death of the body to the life of the mind?
If the subject matter is not funny, Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer prize-winning 1995 play is – very. Julie Hesmondhalgh’s Vivian is drier than a Bond martini and emotional dynamite, the epicentre of a strong cast. Direction by Raz Shaw, comically slick, dramatically moving, provokes laughter, tears and thought.
At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 13 February. Box-office: 0161-833 9833
