Allport's Revenge
Finborough Theatre, London

Patrick Hayes

Turn to any 'Introduction to Medical Ethics' textbook and you'll see the problem at the heart of Melnikoff's Allport's Revenge elaborated in a wealth of case studies and anecdotes. What if a healthy 62-year-old medicine professor were the only viable kidney donor for his son suffering from Allport's? What if he had already donated one of his kidneys to his elder son? Would it be right for him effectively to commit suicide by donating his other kidney? What should his family do?

In Allport's Revenge, his family chooses to discuss the matter endlessly. They squabble. They dredge up the past. They throw up all sort of arguments that take up so much time that by the end of the play the thought experiment has changed somewhat to: what if a dying 62-year-old professor was the only viable kidney donor for his dying son and if the donation didn't happen quickly the professor's illness would destroy his kidney anyway?

If Allport's Revenge does one thing, it brings out the absolute futility of trying to have an objective philosophical discussion between family members - God, ethics, sentimentalism, all sorts of attempts are used by the family members to try to justify their positions. All these 'arguments' really do, however, is simply expose the fact that all the family members have made up their mind what stance to take right at the start.

Indeed the only family member who really needs to make a decision is the father himself. At the start of the play he has made up his mind what to do and no amount of discussion alters that. The rest of the family serves solely to complicate the problem. The mother selfishly decides to reveal the decision to the son on his birthday because she detests her husband's 'stubbornness' - thus subjecting the issue to endless and worthless analysis. She also throws in a little 'dark secret' every scene or two, to the point that they just get tiresome.

The son initially bandies various religious and personal arguments about, but seems to collapse more times in the duration of the play than Frodo Baggins does throughout all three LOTR films, his condition undermining any of his arguments. His girlfriend manages to look awkward, more awkward and, over time, eerily starts to become a mirror image of the snappy, egocentric, irrational mother. The member of the family notable for his absence is the older brother who, sick of the bickering, has (wisely) moved 6,000 miles away to the States.

If one chooses to see Allport's Revenge as a philosophical play, it fails badly. Too much effort is taken to try to make the situation watertight, so that the family has to make an ethical decision rather than appeal to law or practicalities (eg the professor has contacts who would risk their reputations to transplant the kidney). The various 'perspectives' are weakly argued and in some cases simply logically incoherent. To bring the philosophical bent of Allport's Revenge to the forefront, then, would be to view the play as a lifeless Frankenstein's monster that Melnikoff has created, with the actors desperately trying to breathe life into it.

Allport's Revenge succeeds, however, if one looks at it instead as an examination of how a family responds to an extreme situation that requires unpleasant action. Usually through evoking family memories, it offers some great insights into how father-son relationships are forged. The dialectic of relations between the heroic father, idolised by the son, but largely absent during his upbringing, and the jealous obsessive mother, omnipresent during his upbringing, yet taken for granted, is astutely developed and a great strength of the play.

If seen as an examination of the family, all the pitiful attempts at philosophising can also be well understood as very human attempts to come to terms with the situation. As a result a philosophical point is made - that the transition from abstract ethical issue to a particular example is by no means straightforward. Fortunately, director Catriona McLaughlin seems to interpret it in this way. The actors deal with the almost farcically difficult choice of 'to donate or not to donate' with a strong dose of realism - what a family would actually do in this situation. This injects the necessary life into what would have been an elaborate thought experiment of a play.

Till 28 February 2004