Doctor Death

‘European premiere of classic American musical’ is a phrase that deeply alarms the experienced playgoer. As I tootled along to Southwark Playhouse I asked myself why this Rodgers and Hammerstein masterpiece had taken so long to plough its way across the ocean. In 1947 the Broadway prodigies decided to follow up their first two hits, Oklahoma! and Carousel, with a brand new storyline drawn entirely from their imaginations. The plan was to extoll the life of the ordinary Midwest Joe and they created a figure (Joe Jr, after his dad), living in a backwater in the early years of the 20th century.

The script doggedly stalks Joe Jr through every phase of his morally exemplary and supremely tedious existence. He’s born, he endures the ordeals of infancy, he graduates to adolescence, he wins a college place, he follows his father into the medical profession, and he marries a mincing nobody in a skirt. In the unventilated theatre, this worthy pageant unfolded without the slightest trace of narrative surprise or psychological interest. Not much to hum along to either. Even the song titles seemed to fall dead from the programme: ‘Poor Joe’, ‘A Darn Nice Campus’, ‘Two Short Years’, ‘Winters Go By’. At the interval the parched crowd slouched out into the humid pavements of Southwark, swooning from sensory deprivation. Ten precious minutes later, we groaned back in.

The second act was enlivened by two dramatic molehills. First, Dr Dimwit’s shrill flapper of a wife began a dalliance with a rival quack. Then the Doc was offered a prestigious job in Chicago which, not surprisingly, he rejected during a soirée organised to celebrate his promotion. This counter-climax marked the closing term in a sequence of orchestrated comedowns that left everyone wondering if Rodgers and Hammerstein had really intended this as a piece of theatre or as euthanasia treatment.