In early 20th century Russia, over a twenty four hour period, a middle aged asylum doctor, risks everything to engage with the one man in town, who having been just brought in from the local prison, matches him intellectually. Unfortunately this man is insane and this leads to an opening for the doctor’s assistant, to steal his job, his home and his reputation.

SYNOPSIS:

A parochial Russian town hosts this story,. The centre of the action is focussed on the local asylum which is attached to a prison. Ward Six is place run by an intellectual doctor, who is starved of the right company to feed his quest for knowledge and understanding.

The doctor in question begins to engage with a young man, mentally unstable and potentially a murderer, with a paranoid persecution complex, and yet who is his equal in logic and rationality. The doctor becomes obsessed by this man and sudden rumours begin to circulate amongst his colleagues, friends and servants of an unnatural relationship on so many levels.

A new assistant at the asylum sees an opportunity to take everything from the doctor using his relationship with the patient as an excuse to question the doctor’s sanity. He plots with a friend of the doctor to lure the doctor to a Board meeting where his mental and physical state is questioned and his position at the hospital is brought into question. The Assistant inveigles himself into a position of power.

The assistant is now the doctor and is even plotting to steal the doctor’s hospital apartment. Later this day the doctor falls for a trick of his assistant to encourage him to visit the Ward again and there he is accosted by the ward assistant and forced to become a patient himself.

This incarceration proves too much for him and during the first night in the ward he has a non fatal stroke, which leaves him helpless and without hope. The young patient who had debated with him for so long takes pity on him and smothers the doctor with his pillow.