Writer: Edwin Flay
Director: Bernie C. Byrnes
In anticipating this performance, I wondered what could truly be done with the subject-matter. Harold Shipman was a serial killer whose crimes went undetected for the best part of three decades. As a doctor, he took it upon himself to end people’s lives.
As the play reminds us, he refused to co-operate with the police investigation, to give evidence at his trial or co-operate with the public inquiry into his crimes. A brief video clip at the beginning shows Shipman refusing to look at pictures of his victims, defiantly keeping his eyes closed.
Sentenced in 2000 to life imprisonment for 15 of over 200 murders, he committed suicide in his cell four years later. His answer to everything seemed to be silence and death. Given this dreadful real life scenario, the play comes with trigger warnings and age guidance of 14 plus.
What the play achieves, very successfully, is to end the silence. It doesn’t allow the perpetrator to keep control or to end the narrative. This was a case that affected a very large number of families, including that of the solo performer, Edwin Flay, the grandson of Shipman victim Renee Lacey.
It must be very strange for him to play the part of his grandmother’s killer. It would have been easy to portray Shipman, as the tabloid newspapers did at the time, as some kind of monster, as ‘Dr Death’. Flay doesn’t do that.
Instead, this fascinating, well-paced drama tries to understand something of Shipman’s complex character. It’s suggested that he was originally driven to end pain and suffering as a teenager, by witnessing his mother’s drawn-out death from cancer.
This makes the character relatable, maybe even sympathetic at first, but above all it makes him an ordinary human. He’s not the embodiment of supernatural evil or a savage animal. As we find him, he’s a gentle-looking, bearded middle-aged man in a cardigan.
Slowly but surely, his calm and reasonable-sounding manner diverges from his actions. Behind him, the names of clusters of his victims start to appear on a screen. The lengthy title’s allusion to Jack The Ripper-style grisly tales is an appropriate reminder that murder is murder, no matter the clinical setting.
The play imagines Shipman during his last night in his cell, recording a tape in which he describes and, to an extent, seeks to justify his crimes. If the real doctor regarded the police investigation as an insufferable intrusion, the play suggests a formulaic self-justification that each patient was treated in a way that was appropriate to their condition at the time.
However, from his early excursions into euthanasia onwards, this more candid version of Shipman seems to operate a kind of double-think. He’s fully aware that he’s breaking rules and laws, but still feels fully justified in doing so. The catastrophic effects of sheer arrogance become clear, with Shipman ultimately revealing that having control over life and death was what kept him killing people.
Much of the content of this well-researched play is conjecture, but as a fictionalised psychological portrait, it’s persuasive. Having this opportunity to reflect on the actions of a renegade doctor seems more like justice than what actually happened.
Runs until 26 August 2023 | Image: Contributed
The Reviews Hub Score
Compelling
