In the novel Laws of the House of God, a darkly comic take on medical internships, author Samuel Shen maintains, “The patient is the one with the disease. They can always hurt you more.”
In Canadian Stage’s current production of Blue/Orange, British playwright Joe Penhall’s equally dark account of a power struggle between a psychiatric resident and his potential supervisor, it is not at all clear whether the patient is more diseased and damaging than his doctors.
Blue/Orange dramatizes the doctor’s disagreement concerning the imminent release of an inmate who has come to the end of a legally-mandated month-long stay in the psychiatric institution. Christopher (played remarkably subtly by Kevin Hanchard) is a young Caribbean man living in a housing project in London who may or may not be showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Isolated by poverty and by fear of his neighbours-who are either (depending on one’s interpretation) violent skinheads or vandalizing zombies-Christopher oscillates between eagerness to escape his paternalistic caregivers and fear of returning to his unwelcoming home.
Bruce (Darren Keay), a novice physician, is eager to have Christopher stay, as schizophrenia is difficult to diagnose, and even more difficult to treat, on an outpatient basis. When he calls in his consulting physician and potential research sponsor, however, he finds that Robert (R.H. Thomson) is unwilling to entertain the suggestion that Christopher be recommitted for further observation, due both to a lack of beds and a lack of respect for his underling’s observations.
So the conflict seems clear: Bruce the committed-but-naïve new physician advocates for his patient while the callous-but-realist supervisor protects the bottom line.
But no sooner do the characters set up their soapboxes than they start falling off them. Or rather, flailing around them. At first, the issues seem too obvious, the characters too broad-are we really expected to believe that Bruce made it through medical school in post-Thatcherite Britain without ever confronting the issue of budget constraints? What senior physician would enter an occupied consulting room blustering about loft developments? But Penhall rapidly challenges our diagnoses of the characters’ motivations.
The script is extremely adept at pacing its revelations, and keeps the audience’s loyalties shifting-is Robert motivated by the bottom line, by respect for patients’ sociocultural backgrounds, by a healthy skepticism, or by his own careerism? Is Bruce committed to his patients, or to his nascent professional privilege?
Penhall elegantly manipulates our interpretation of events by also emphasizing the ambiguity of Christopher’s prognosis. Uncertain explanations and shifting loyalties echo the fundamental problem of parsing the causes of anyone’s behaviour, whether we are searching for a diagnosis or just a coherent explanation.
Avoid attending this play with a trainspotting psychology major, unless you enjoy your theatrical experiences with footnotes: “Ooh, I recognize that diagnostic tool!” “Why isn’t he quoting more Szasz?”, etc. The play does an excellent job in dramatizing what are often highly theoretical ideas-Toronto stage and screen veteran R.H. Thomson is particularly effective as Robert, gently revealing enough arrogance and insecurity to humanize a mildly caricatured bundle of issues without mawkishness-but finally suggests that they are grounded less in theory than in struggles for power.
As Christopher is freed (or abandoned) back to his life and the viewer is left with the spectacle of the physician’s bureaucratic battle, it is evident that Penhall is highlighting just how significantly desire for dominance influences our construction of reality. Unfortunately, this suggests that the drama of diagnosis is simultaneously dangerous and futile; once the patient leaves the room, the soul of the problem goes with him. The ‘disease’ disappears, and so too the risk of significance. Like its title, Blue/Orange reveals two sides to every story. Thoughtful theatre that resonates long after you’ve seen it.
