I remember in the 1970s reading a notice on the door of someone’s university room which said, ‘Happiness is selfish’. I recognised the justice of this statement, and it filled me with despair, partly because I was unsure how to be usefully unselfish except by becoming politically active. Wallace Shawn’s The Fever makes the same statement at much greater length (an hour and a half non-stop monologue), and plays on the same guilt. A well-meaning liberal (could be man or woman, but in this production it’s a woman) visits a grim unnamed country in the Third World, and suffers a nauseous fever in which she is, or imagines she is, imprisoned and tortured as so many of the citizens in that country constantly are. But in a way this sickness is healing – it clears away what the playwright clearly feels is the usual distorted view of the world until the protagonist sees things as they really are.
     ‘Do you think anyone enjoyed that?’ asked my boyfriend as we clapped with sheer relief at the end. Certainly not was the answer, but the criterion of a good production is not necessarily that it is enjoyable, and thank God the actress performing the monologue is the excellent Clare Higgins, who has such presence and such conviction that she manages to hold the audience throughout. All the same, even she couldn’t make The Fever or its message entirely interesting or new, though she could convey its appropriate depressingness. It is the result of taking consequentialist morality to an extreme, which says that: if an action is only good in so far as it achieves good consequences (‘good’ probably meaning ‘creating as much happiness for as many people as possible’), then any actions that do NOT achieve good (happy-making) consequences are bad. Omission is as damnable as commission, which means that you are damned, for you are not spending your entire life trying to make other people happy, and you have no justifiable reason for doing anything else - it’s not just what you do that harms, but what you don’t do. And worse, just by being in a privileged position, in a part of the world that is privileged, you are automatically as much of a miscreant as war criminals, torturers, child murderers, since your privilege depends on others’ privation.
     ‘There’s still the preface – everything that happened before I was born. The voluptuous field that was given to me - how did I come to be given that one, and not the one that was uncultivatable? … The fields were taken and pieced together, one by one, by thieves, by killers, … until the beautiful Christmas morning we woke up, and our proud parents showed us the gorgeous, shining, blood-soaked fields which now were ours.’
     It would be ad hominem to say (but I’ll say it) that Wallace Shawn certainly inherited a ‘voluptous field’ – his father was a long-time editor of the New Yorker magazine, and he had an enviably privileged and cultivated background – and of course that would only exacerbate the guilt he wants to pass on to his audiences. Just as it would be ad hominem to be influenced in one’s attitude to the play by the fact that, fairly predictably, Michael Billington in The Guardian has praised it, and The Telegraph’s Charles Spencer has reviled it, which should make one uneasy in criticising it. All the same, I can’t help but remember the self-indulgent wankfest that was My Dinner with André, a 1981 film written by and starring Wally Shawn, and wondering whether, when he performs The Fever at people’s dinner parties (which he often does) the congratulations from the audience could ever compete with his own self-congratulation.
Jane O'Grady