David Haig claims "enormous admiration" for The Samaritans, but he has the oddest way of showing it. Far from showing the value of this British-born, voluntary organisation that provides telephone and personal support for the suicidal, Haig threatens to undermine confidence in its probity. The Good Samaritan principally shows how a male Samaritan volunteer exploits and damages an unhappy, young, working-class woman who comes for help. Yes, the couple fall in lust. Haig describes the rise and fall of their unconsummated affair. Handsome middle-class Alan, something big in publishing, falls for flirty, cockney Carol, whose dead husband dealt in cocaine.
Haig sets his scene in a Samaritan London branch, where the telephone rarely stops ringing. "Are you wearing women's clothes?" asks Polly Adams's cut-glass volunteer of some desperate, gay transvestite on the line, before recommending M and S's brassieres and knickers, as if to put the man at ease with himself and his wardrobe. This may ring a little false, but worse is to come. To avoid emotional involvement, it's explained that those visiting Samaritan branches for help will not see the same volunteer each time. Yet Haig schematically allows Alan to see Carol often enough to let passion develop.
Alan's wife, Rachel (Jane Gurnett), who's conveniently another volunteer, despite having three young children to care for, allows him to continue counselling the woman. What counsel it becomes. "I pull my underpants down. My heart is beating. Our mouths fit together," Julian Wadham's tightly buttoned Alan glumly intones, mentally drawing Carol into a laughable, erotic fantasy when they meet on Dulwich Common. John Dove's production is not very smooth, but Claudie Blakley makes the underdeveloped character of Carol powerful and poignant. She exudes aggression, flirtatiousness and mocking humour in one fell swoop, while conveying instability and vulnerability as well.
A programme note admits some of the play's incidents are not true to Samaritan "policies or actual practices". It would have been more honourable and responsible, therefore, to keep the Samaritan name out of this conventional study of erotics that forgets ethics.
?Until 26 August. Box office: 020 7722 9301.
The Good Samaritan
