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For a problem play full of rather unsavoury characters -- perhaps the most unsavoury collection of souls in any play by George Bernard Shaw -- The Doctor's Dilemma is quite deliciously funny.

It's possible, though, that the dark humour works best on those with a dark bent, and more so during a pandemic when the dilemmas doctors face are a common part of everything we see and hear in the COVID ravaged world around us.

Shaw provides a full and robust examination of the Doctor's Dilemma with some results that could (and maybe should) make us cringe even with all the laughter that supports the action, if not for the fact that the dilemma is solved almost everyday in the most unethical ways without any of us blinking an eye. It is easy for we audience members to deplore a stage debate about who is "worthy" of being saved, or to pretend shock for some of the other motives at work in Shaw's play, but our governments and cultures have answered the dilemma by making those worthy of being saved easy to determine: if you can afford it you can be saved.

Of course there are many countries who have universal healthcare and would seem to have put that dilemma to rest, yet they are countries rich enough to create COVID vaccines (it's interesting to note that Shaw, in The Doctor's Dilemma, suggests that vaccines are a scam, but one doubts he would feel that way today), produce COVID vaccines, and horde COVID vaccines, thus keeping them away from other, poorer nations who simply cannot afford to be saved. Perhaps entire health care systems from governments down should be driven by ethics, rather than simply the Doctors we expect to be ethical touchstones.

All of which is to say that Shaw's brilliant The Doctor's Dilemma is as relevant today as the day it was written. And the lessens therein? I doubt we will ever truly learn them.