"THE ANATOMIST”

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25301, 29 September 1947, Page 3

"THE ANATOMIST”

\the stage

James Bridie Play At Radiant Theatre

How satisfying it was on. Saturday pypnin l ' to see in the Radiant Theatre a play with moments big enough to make the nerves tingle. humour on the edge of horror, making sallies in force across the footlights to carry imagination off into its own territory. Mr James Bridies “The Anatomist was an excellent choice by Miss Ngaio Marsh for the Repertory Society, and her production of it has the strong and confident rhythm that has distinguished her Shakespeare productions. The movement and thrust of the play leave an impression that survives any argument about detail—-or about the author’s construction. “The Anatomist” is founded on history, the history of Dr. Robert Knox, of Edinburgh, and the Burke and Hare murders. The first act sets the period and prepares for the events, shocking and true, of the second; the third shows •Knox attitudinising as a St George for medical science against the dragon of mob- prejudice and violence. Or he is, perhaps, more of an Oedipus, innocently guilty; but the play does not pronounce finally upon how much he knew, or how much he cared, about the source of the human bodies procured by his assistants for dissection. Mr Guy Cotterill’s task as Dr. .Knox is all the more difficult because of the anticipatory highlighting of the sinister doctor before his entry into the draw-ing-room in the first act. Violent, capricious, he should be,, conscious of loneliness in the pursuit of a science which both horrified and fascinated the mind of the time. This Last is heavily accented by Mr Cotterill’s Dracula-like costume and the piratical eye-patch (.which xs written into the play). But there seems not enough depth of shadow beneath the eccentric, irritable surface. One was inclined to. share the antipathy of Mary Belle Dishart (Miss Brigid Lenihan). But the scent of excitement begins to freshen just when the Doctor's ener--Betic oddities might lose significance, liana Craig, as the masterful Amelia Dishart, and Mr Cotterill bring , the act to a confident, expectant curtain, which falls to the eerie tunelessness

of the Doctor’s flute—an eldritch noise which must have cost Mr Cotterill some practice.

Then head first into the real thing, the two scenes of the second act into which Bridie has packed the heavy .body blows of his play. The violence and horror that were all talk in the

drawing-room—we have minded our manners in too many repertory draw-ing-rooms—haunt every corner of the Three Tuns Tavern. This is a splendid ■set. Miss Marsh has taken us below ground level; a giant shadow cast by some lurid concealed light comes "downstairs with each person. Here Dr. Walter Anderson (Mr Bernard Kearns) comes to forget the terrible science of dissection and the gulf it has placed between himself and Mary Belle Dishart. Here Mary Paterson (Miss Ruth Mandi), a girl off the street, mothers him in his drunkenness. Here Burke and Hare (Keith Thompson and Jack Woods) make their fiendish bargain with David Paterson, Knox’s janitor (Mr John Pocock). Since Miss Marsh’s “Hamlet” and “Othello” there has been no scene or act done here so impressively as this. Mr Kearns’s drunken despair is really fine work; he gives depth, candour as well as cleverness, to what can so easily be crudely improvised. Three incidents and groupings of this scene could remain as reminders of the play: Miss Mandi singing “O Can Ye Sew Cushions”; the

common haggling between Mr Pocock. Mr Thompson, and Mr Woods over the orioe of a body; the superb stairway exit of Miss Mandi and the two bodysnatchers. Miss Mandi takes no shortcuts with her personal vitality or youthful appeal; her savagery and tenderness in this part have a good share of the art of being larger than life (only one posture seemed held rather long, being dancelike and stylised, in the arms of Burke—or Hare). The almost silent, ahrmal terror ■of Janet (Miss Zella Martin) is much more, than a detail; she moves, protests. and is grouped so as to heighten tire nightmare atmosphere. Scene 2 of this act is climactic, but half-way back already from nightmare to actuality. Here Mr Cotterill is most assuredly Dr. Knox and Dr. Knox most plausibly himself, though Knox (one is by now convinced) is less a tangible hero than a certain impressive gap in the fabric of the play, cut —admittedly—to an imposing shape and size. Most decisive. Mr Focock’s devilish reading from Leviticus; Mr Kearns telling Mr Ferdinand Watson — who manfully strives with the part of Adolphus Raby—not to bother about the hammer; the revelation of murder (like Agamemnon’s, discovered off stage): the dawn and the drawing back of blinds.

After this, the return of Knox to the centre in the third act seems a duty rather than a necessity. But Mr Cotterill. defying mobs with pistols and rhetoric, Diana Craig, bringing him to his less valiant senses. Miss Lenihan. Mr Kearns. 16 bold medical students and all, see to it that duty is cheerfully performed. It is a fine, if inconsequent flourish that ends the play, and leaves none of the best moments either dimmed or confused.