Fringe 25: Dr Orr

Rating: ★★

Edinburgh University Shakespeare Company’s Fringe Festival offering this year follows a female surgeon stepping into the shoes of Macbeth. This promising premise flounders as it struggles to find its footing, ultimately making it plain that the showrunners have bitten off more than they can chew. 

Dr Orr’s main claim to existence is the use of Glaswegian composer Buxton Orr’s music to soundtrack the titular character’s descent into madness. Much of the show’s 40-minute runtime is also dedicated to operatic breaks from the plot, giving a few of the actors time to demonstrate their vocal prowess. Whilst this is a delight to hear, its necessity given the packed plot of the original source material is questionable at best. At worst, it’s cutting the play off at the knees. Dr Orr plays it safe when it comes to creative liberty, having Nicole Dickie as Dr Orr, a surgeon, kill the Head of Medicine (King Duncan given a makeover into everyman misogynist boss, Dr Murray) with a scalpel and blame it on an anaesthetist. In fact, much of the play’s strokes of genius are blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments, such as Dr Orr’s self-medicating, yet the writing often limits itself to treading the same paths as its source material. Significant time is spent on set-up, establishing each character and their relation to Shakespeare’s text, leaving only ten minutes for the majority of the play’s action to take place. 

When we do arrive at the action, however, it is portrayed as almost glib; Dr Orr’s descent into madness is more giggly than desperate, far from the unravelling manic murderer the audience should be seeing. It is unclear whether this is a fault with the acting or directing, as many of the actors seem unsure of how to get from A to B in each scene although all actors had incredible stage presence and managed to keep the audience’s attention. The clear standout was Lindsay MacLaren as Dr Jennifer Daeblitz, the toned-down version of Lady Macbeth we are treated to. Despite her obvious talent, the actor is undercut by not having much to do in comparison to Shakespeare’s character; Jenny, as she is referred to, is far less cunning and scheming than her foremother, and after all of the opera the play does not have time for her eventual descent into madness. Dr Orr makes an odd writing choice in switching Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s roles; Dr Orr becomes the driving force of the plot, giggling away as she takes out half the hospital, whilst Jenny is given little else to do but frettingly bite her nails in the background and almost take out Freddy (Richard Pullan) with a shot of insulin. This is the closest the play gets to doing something interesting with the ‘Macbeth in a hospital’ premise. One might ruminate on the strange choice to strip back the substance of the only woman character in the original text in a play that for all intents and purposes, aims to be feminist. 

For it does want to be feminist! The play comes so close to calling the lack of respect given to Dr Orr within the walls of the hospital sexist, mostly by way many of the characters patronisingly calling her ‘love’, or ‘darling’, or ‘Louise’. Nicole Dickie masters her slyly threatening way of admonishing the other doctors, repeatedly saying ‘call me ‘Dr Orr’’ all the way to Dr Murray’s death. (This was the only glaring hole I couldn’t get my head around; in the UK at least, surgeons are not typically called ‘Doctor’.) Yet despite the best efforts of all actors involved, the play falls short in combining Dr Orr’s frustration at always being diminished and dismissed for her gender with the ambitious nature of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a way that would be able to stay with the audience throughout the clumsy shoehorning-in of the original text’s characters, the climax taking place over all of two minutes, and all that opera. Perhaps it could have benefited from a co-writer. Maybe even a woman.