The Benefactor

Ron Davies was a professional stage manager and Library Systems Analyst at the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa.

The prolific George Woodcock has dug into a drawer of old manuscripts for this radio drama, first produced by the CBC in the mid-sixties. A morality play in verse, The Benefactor examines the notion of charity, and the complex motives and emotions that lie in the heart of giver and recipient. The title character is Simon Mercator, a fantastically successful businessman who has made a point of giving away large sums of money to charitable institutions. Yet Mercator is no saint. While building up the City Infirmary he has ruined the career of a young surgeon whose momentary lapse killed Mercator’s wife and has taken the surgeon’s wife as his mistress when she loses respect for her husband. As well he has impoverished a young artist, Irving Falbridge, by instigating a lawsuit that diverts Falbridge’s inheritance to the hospital building fund. The surgeon’s marriage is saved when he reasserts his individuality by giving up his job, but Mercator cannot escape retribution: he is murdered by Falbridge when the artist learns that Mercator, bitten by remorse, is indirectly providing him with financial support, thereby sapping the artist of his self-respect.

Woodcock has hung this tangled web of good intentions and evil consequences on a couple of slender threads: the principle that “the general good is a pious lie” and the premise that individual understanding and pity are necessary prerequisites for charity. The intellectual issues are clearly presented, but philosophy by itself cannot make up a play. The verse, though good, rarely makes the spine tingle; and the characters, forced to demonstrate the moral arguments, don’t often strike a sympathetic chord. The Benefactor is all too likely to suffer the fate of most medieval morality plays: to be respected, but to be read more often out of a sense of duty or culture than with real pleasure.