Word: doctorate
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...play of violent action or of individual detachment. A stale retired professor (Serebriakov), his young wife (Elena), and the daughter (Sonia), brother (Vanya), and mother of his first wife live cramped lives on a faded Russian estate. A visitor, the overworked local doctor (Astrov) wanders in and out of the household. Sonia loves the doctor, who is unaware of her as a woman. Vanya, who feels oppressed and trapped, shares with the doctor a love for Elena, who is quite miserable with her old and pompous husband. The doctor dreams of forestry and the future, yet sees his education...
...there is fine acting in the production. As Doctor Astrov, Robert Jordan is extraordinarily right. His skillful make-up helps his exceptional voice and delightful, slightly grand manner; he becomes both noble and sad, within seriousness, especially in his most effective scene, and displays a remarkable facility in portraying comedy where he is drunk. As Vanya, John Mautner is at moments persuasive. His performance vacillates uneasily, however, and his awkward arms and constantly nervous voice and eyes were occasionally distracting. Even if Vanya is nervous, Mautner could well be more relaxed...
...funny indeed as the wife who regularly pours out her troubles to her psychoanalyst, and she is more than matched by Dan Dailey's portrayal of her actor-husband. Tony Randall clowns through the film with just the right amount of buffoonery as a slightly screwy patient whom the doctor discovers has had an affair with his fiancee. Mr. Randall has a wonderful sense of comic gesture and expression...
...woman who believes her son is being tortured in the basement, a teen-age boy who shoots and kills his brother "just to see what it felt like." These vignettes, complete and unrelated stories in themselves, are used much like algebraic problems by Novelist Deich to set the doctor and the pastor puzzling over the cube roots of free will, normality, responsibility and guilt. To the pastor, psychiatry is an abomination of the spirit; to the psychiatrist, Christianity is an insult to the intelligence...
...then, perhaps he hasn't really written a play. A critic reportedly once chastised Bernard Shaw for never having presented a death scene on the stage, whereupon GBS replied by writing the drawn-out, harrowing affair which takes up most of the last act of The Doctor's Dilemma. Possibly acting on the theory that he could prove himself a greater playwright than Shaw, McLiam has put together a death scene that lasts for three out of three acts and that gives James Barton, who plays Pat Muldoon, the opportunity to die not once, but twice. For a play which...