Theatre: David Le Page
Watching the first minutes of The Choice (Civic Theatre) is like being steeped in a wash of pop- psychology epigrams. If Ray and Sal were actually people, they would have to memorise reams of material from women’s magazines and Readers’ Digest “10 Steps to a better Marriage/Relationship”-type articles to be able to spout as much of the verbiage of implausible bliss.
Sal (Rika Sennett) is a journalist; Ray (Gary d’Alessandro), an illustrator. They live together with their 2,6 neuroses, and are deeply, frantically committed to each other, overwrought with happiness, especially when they discover they are about to have a baby.
They do have a couple of worries; in the first scene, where Sal announces her pregnancy, she (an educated late-20th-century woman!) is worried about having sex, lest it hurt the unborn child. Ray, blissful at first, then confides in her his new-found anxiety; that he should be jealous of a child with which he would have to compete for her attention. Neither of these anxieties being very singular, their relief requires little more than a couple of glib reassurances.
This unlikely relationship is not helped by Lesley Nott’s direction which leaves no space for silence, the negative space that can define characters as much as their words. She has allowed Sennet and D’Alessandro to make Ray and Sal a blithe, sanitised and profoundly uninteresting “modern couple”. Only towards the end, when events force them to start behaving like real people, do their characters become believable and sympathetic.
Ray’s and Sal’s deteriorating connubial bliss is alternated with a narrative from The Writer and a parallel and at times overlapping drama between The Midwife and The Consultant. The Writer is the alter ego of the play’s author, Claire Luckham, and when she is not making wry comments about The Midwife and The Consultant, she speaks about her brother, who has Down’s Syndrome, though this is not revealed until she has spoken about him for long enough to give us the impression that he is quite normal.
The Consultant, the doctor who is to reveal to Sal that her child, should she decide to have it, would be born with Down’s Syndrome, is as much an agglomeration of media-generated human characteristics as are Ray and Sal. Perturbed by his lack of eccentricity, he idly pursues dreams of being a leather-clad biker. With similar imagination, he fantasises about discovering The Midwife, stretched across a double bed in his room, clad only in a negligee. A cold, dispassionate scientist, he believes the world to be overpopulated, and not adding a single head to that population to be his moral duty. Ray and The Writer passionately and implicitly oppose him, while Sal agonises.
What is The Choice’s contribution to the debate? To make it clearer that the pro-choice/ pro-life debate is not just about when a few slippery globules of nucleic acid can be called human, but about a clash between two utterly different philosophical and ethical traditions. On the one side stands science, objective, implacable in its reason, and sure that any equation of good and evil can be resolved by simplifying the factors and weighing in on the side of good. On the other side is love and faith and religion, subjective, always doomed to seem, and often to be, irrational and obdurate.
Do we really, Luckham seems to be saying, gain anything when we say, oh dear, raising this child is going to require a lot more effort than I actually bargained for; think I’ll give this one a miss? Perhaps the more we avoid taking responsibility and evade struggle, hardship and sacrifice, the more effete we become.
Luckham chooses to end her play by showing us a video of her brother Ben. But this little slice of poignant reality adds nothing to her drama, rather seeming to bespeak a lack of confidence in what precedes it: “Well, just in case they’re in any doubt as to what to think at the end, let’s drive it home with a documentary sledgehammer.” Luckham’s case for allowing Down’s Syndrome children a life, for that is what it is, is in content if not form, quite strong enough without this final tactic.