“True wit,” according to Alexander Pope, “is nature to advantage dress’d / What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d.” The conceit applies to Margaret Edson’s play about Vivian Bearing, an American professor specialising in the poetry of John Donne, who is diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer and admitted to a New York teaching hospital for a gruelling series of experimental trials.
Edson, a schoolteacher from Washington DC, won a Pulitzer prize for her first and only drama, which was first produced in 1995. It was subsequently made into a television film featuring Emma Thompson, although revivals on this side of the Atlantic are relatively rare. Edson’s writing has its harrowing moments but it is never maudlin, and it is delivered with a carapace of humour that causes the consultant’s announcement “you have cancer” to elicit an uproarious laugh.
It’s not that the play endeavours to present the funny side of cancer – there really isn’t one – rather that Julie Hesmondhalgh’s superlative central performance perfectly articulates Vivian’s ability to deconstruct her experience with the same intellectual rigour she might apply to a John Donne sonnet. Shaven-headed and tethered to a drip, she speculates on how Donne might have toyed with the paradox of a course of treatment that ultimately becomes injurious to one’s health; and remains sharply aware that the doctors conducting the trial treat her less like a human being than an object of research: “Once I did the teaching, now I am taught.”
The play is given an authoritative, keenly paced production by Raz Shaw, who has experienced cancer and blogs about the subject. There’s a slew of fine supporting performances, particularly by Esh Alladi as an ambitious medic who attended Vivian’s poetry class because it was the toughest the university had to offer; and by Julie Legrand as a formidable grande dame of textual criticism who first taught Vivian to perceive a universe of meaning in the placement of a comma.
The final, astonishing image is as shockingly apposite as the theatre has to offer. And though you could argue that the late onset of sentimentality seems at odds with the prevailing tone of rationalism, it wraps up a paradox of which the metaphysical poets would be proud: a genuinely life-enhancing play about death.
At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 13 February. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
