Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The forgotten story of the pioneering surgeon who healed disfigured airmen

Andrew Doyle tells Lloyd Evans about his new musical celebrating the life-changing work of maverick Archibald McIndoe

New faces: ‘McIndoe wanted the patients to be happy. He let everyone drink on the ward, and smoke on the ward’. Credit: copyright: Queen Victoria Hospital /East Grinstead Museum

‘You’re inside an incinerator. The cockpit is on fire. You are burning. You can see bits of your body melting off. And you are struggling to get out.’ This is Andrew Doyle, the creator of Titania McGrath, describing to me the experience of an RAF pilot trying to escape from a stricken plane during the second world war. He explains that the injured airmen were treated by a New Zealand surgeon, Archibald McIndoe, who developed new methods for repairing skin damage at a specialist burns unit in the 1940s. And this is the subject that Doyle has chosen for a new musical.

It may seem an odd departure for the anti-woke satirist but his passion for musical theatre is long-standing. He has written more than half a dozen song-and-dance shows with various collaborators. ‘I started to research this story long before I came up with Titania,’ he says. ‘To lose your face is an incomprehensible experience. It is your identity. It is the way the world sees you. And to go through that level of pain, to find a way out, and to rebuild yourself, suggests a degree of courage that I can barely understand.’

Archibald McIndoe worked at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead and he referred to his patients as the Guinea Pig club. The recovering airmen formed a lifelong bond that continues to this day. Doyle interviewed the club secretary while he was investigating the story. ‘They carried on meeting until a couple of years ago. The youngest must be about 92, so there are only 15 or 20 of them left alive.’

McIndoe didn’t just repair faces, he set out to heal the psychological scars as well. ‘He wanted the patients to be happy. He hired pretty nurses. He let everyone drink on the ward, and smoke on the ward, and they wore whatever they liked.

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