The Theater: Ballet of Death

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THE NATIONAL HEALTH

by PETER NICHOLS

In a brief two decades, the young British dramatists who railed angrily at the Establishment have been succeeded by caustic young playwrights who acidly mock the welfare state. Underlying that mockery is a sour nagging resentment of the present sorry state of England. Thus it is no unintended irony that The National Health is set in a hospital ward for the dying.

Death takes no holidays in this ward; it is only impeded by intrusive, intensive care. As one inmate puts it: "They keep you busy here. They even wake you up to give you a sleeping pill."

One patient is dying of cancer, but all of them are terminal cases. One is a hopeless alcoholic; another is drowning in a morbid, pervasive melancholia; still another, a boy of 19, has not only totaled his motorcycle but also his mind. Several are old, old men for whom life has become the cruelest possible bondage. The hospital can offer them everything except dignity.

Constant messengers of hope assail them. Periodically, an old biddy pops in to pass out leaflets and verbal pep pills: "Good morning. I have a message for you. It's that God gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life." Moments later, the ballet of death begins again as white screens wheel and circle to shield in final decorum the bed of a dying patient.

Silence ought to be the motif of such a room, or so one might think. Instead, it is raucous with gallows humor. There is probably not an outright comedy on Broadway at which one could clock more smiles, snorts, giggles and guffaws. Quite apart from the patients' sometimes grisly jests, the response of the audience obviously has complex, uneasy, psychological roots. Laughter is a wonder drug by which man anesthetizes his consciousness of mortality.

The cast is exemplary. To cite one player would be to slight another. No one in contemporary theater orchestrates mordant laughter with a surer hand than Playwright Peter Nichols. His forked tongue darts at everything, but his compassion is deep and pure.

Those who saw A Day in the Death of Joe Egg know that he confected humor out of a situation in which parents were coping with a mongoloid child. One miracle deserves another, and Nichols has performed it again in The National Health. -T.E.K.