WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?
By Brian Clark
In earlier times, the question posed by this play's title would never have arisen. Life was God's, to give and to take. But medical technology's present ability to sustain inert human remnants poses a fresh moral dilemma. Between medical authority and an individual's right to decide his own fate, who plays God?
Ken Harrison (Tom Conti) is paralyzed from the neck down after a car crash. Possessing a terrible lucidity about his sorry state, Harrison wants to die. Self-righteously governed by a rigid ethical imperative, the doctor in charge, Dr. Emerson (Philip Bosco), means to prolong Harrison's existence.
Coffined under the white sheets of a hospital bed, Harrison is a lively tribute to the resilience of the human spirit under duress. A sculptor by craft, Harrison has a witty tongue, an agile intelligence and a wicked gift for logic and paradox; yet his plight makes his animated flow of mockingly funny words self-scalding. Conti makes the character an irresistible charmer whose naughty pillow talk seduces the nursing staff and even Dr. Scott (Jean Marsh of Upstairs, Downstairs renown), who loses her professional cool along with part of her heart.
The play is didactic and padded with anemic subplots. It lives through Conti. Quite apart from his resonant vocal range, he has wondrously expressive eyes, incendiary in rage, impish in mischief, grave in contemplation and stinging in pain. Few Broadway debuts are so auspiciously marked on the dateless calendar of brilliance. It is a measure of Conti "s achievement that we cheer his victory unto death and mourn the loss of the man in the same instant.
For much of his career Tom Conti has been called the British Dustin Hoffman. He looks so much like Hoff man that he once fooled even himself. "I did a film a couple of years ago," he says, "and there was a bit in which I was lying upside down, unconscious in a sailboat. The shot came up later on when I was watching the rushes and I thought. 'God! That's Dustin Hoffman!' " Conti also finds himself in odd positions in Whose Life Is It Any way?, but not for a second does the audience doubt whom it is seeing. The play belongs to Conti, and if Dustin Hoffman is not careful, he may some day be identified as the American Tom Conti.