f the or mph o triu icine med
Volume VII, Issue IV February, 2010
H
ealth care reform of a darkly comic kind drives DR. KNOCK, OR THE TRIUMPH OF MEDICINE, Jules Romains’ tart 1923 satire. “A doctor transforms an entire district of unhappily healthy citizens into a flourishing community of happy invalids,” was how The London Times described the plot, reviewing the 1994 London revival. The Spectator deemed DR. KNOCK “the funniest play about medical quackery since Moliere’s Le Malade Imaginaire.”
Medical quackery informs only one level of DR. KNOCK’s humor. Scratch the surface, and you find something more complex. Michael Billington, seeing Sam Walters’ 1979 revival at London’s Orange Tree Theater wrote in the Guardian: Never having seen DR. KNOCK before, I went expecting a brisk, anti-medical lampoon; what I found was a spare, lean play of considerable complexity and topicality. In the first place, it is much more a satire on public credulity than professional quackery. The eponymous hero is a self-taught medico, addicted since childhood to patent medicines, who takes over the practice in an ostensibly healthy mountain village. Offering free consultation to the residents and fee-paying sessions to the rest, he turns the village into a boom community for illness and disease. But the real joke is that he is motivated not by greed or gain but by a perverted idealism. In recent decades, Knock’s powerful fanaticism has been interpreted as foreshadowing the wave of fascism that swept Europe prior to World War II, a caustic “symbol of all the false prophets—political, religious, scientific—that have enthralled the gullible 20th century,” as put by critic Lyn Gardner, reviewing the 1994 London revival, also directed by Walters. In testament to the play’s undying relevance, Walters directed DR. KNOCK three times in London between 1967 and 1994.
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Significantly, during the 1920s, Romains ranked among the most produced playwrights in the world, alongside George Bernard Shaw and Luigi Pirandello. By 1930, he had four plays playing simultaneously in Paris. He would go on to preside over the French branch of PEN, the international writers’ association championing free speech, and was elected to the Academie Francaise. A novelist and poet as well as a playwright, his most famous work was his 27-volume epic Men of Good Will. DR. KNOCK, OR THE TRIUMPH OF MEDICINE first opened in Paris in 1923. The play ran for an unprecedented five years and made a star of actor Louis Jouvet in the title role. Jouvet would play Dr. Knock almost to the day he died. He revived the play frequently over the next three decades, and starred in three film versions, including the 1951 film, his last completed cinematic role. To this day, the play remains widely read and revived in France. The term Knockisme has entered the language, used to denote popular credibility and gullibility. An heavily bowdlerized English translation by Harley Granville-Barker was first published in 1925 (dropping the subtitle THE TRIUMPH OF MEDICINE) and “Romains’ brilliant French farce” was subsequently listed among the “Plays of the Year” by The Observer. The 1926 London production was lauded and for the next decade, DR. KNOCK was frequently revived in London and across England. St. John Ervine, the Irish critic and playwright (author of JOHN FERGUSON, revived at the Mint in 2006) saw a production in Manchester
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