A HUSBAND takes his chronically ill wife to Switzerland to be helped to die yet won’t face a British court. A man watches his sister, a multiple sclerosis victim, suffocate herself and isn’t prosecuted. A retired policeman gets a suspended jail sentence after killing his sick wife in a botched suicide pact. The Archbishop of Canterbury warns that the right to refuse some life-saving treatments is mutating into a right to assisted death. Recent events certainly suggest that the play that brings Kim Cattrall to the West End is even more topical than when Brian Clark wrote it and Tom Conti played the main role — then male, now female — way back in 1978.

Cattrall got used to beds when she was in TV’s Sex and the City, but the one she occupies throughout Peter Hall’s fine revival of Whose Life is it Anyway? is a bit different. Her Claire Harrison is a sculptor who has been reduced to a talking, swivelling head after wrecking her spine in a road accident and seems doomed to spend her remaining days vegetating on a support system. Should she be allowed to sentence herself to death by leaving hospital, as she wants? Or should her doctor interpret her wish as clinical depression and battle it? Who is right, the pro-choice or pro-life party?

Both the play’s truculent title and Claire’s articulacy make it clear whose side Clark is on, but he’s careful to put the opposing case. Dr Emerson may be arrogant when he forces tranquillisers on his patient, but William Chubb, who plays him, is genuinely caring, well-meaning and responsible, as are all his staff. Why should doctors and nurses make the Grim Reaper welcome when they’ve vowed to battle him?

References to stem-cell research, Stephen Hawking and Christopher Reeve add to the sense that this is a play for 2005, and an intelligent, compassionate one. Yet it left me uneasy. Isn’t Clark weighting his evidence both by making his heroine a sculptor, and therefore uniquely reliant on her hands, and by giving her a family that seems unusually tough and stays conveniently offstage?

Still, the hearing that ends the play, which brings a troubled Janet Suzman into Claire’s room as the judge who must decide her fate, brings a tense evening to a quietly gripping climax. And, yes, Cattrall’s performance is strong enough to make us care about her fate. Maybe her Claire isn’t as angry as the text requires, but you feel her pain, appreciate her wry bravado, and, not least, sense how awful it is to have ordinary desires in a body that cannot express them. And she achieves that with nothing but a mouth, keen eyes and sallow cheeks: some feat!

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