Juliet Stevenson shines in a superb farewell from a great British director
The Doctor Almeida, London N1 ★★★★★
It’s a fond farewell to Robert Icke. The brightest directing talent British theatre has produced in a generation – and the youngest ever winner of the Olivier Award for Best Director to boot – is leaving his permanent post on these shores for pastures new, and possibly more experimental, in Europe. His final huzzah at the Almeida, the venue that has nurtured Icke and given rise to his phenomenal work on Oresteia and
Mary Stuart, to name but two, serves as a razor-sharp reminder of what is about to be lost.
For starters, Icke must once more be ruing the fact that theatre doesn’t follow film’s lead and include a Best Adapted Play category in its award ceremonies as, in addition to his directorial nous he is equally adept at intellectually dazzling new spins on classic texts. He freely, skilfully and rigorously transposes Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 Viennese drama
Professor Bernhardi to contemporary England, gently nudging the debate along from its starting point of medical ethics to cover personal morality and, finally, the hot topic of identity politics. The impassioned howl he raises against the reductive nature of the latter could surely be heard on the continent.
Schnitzler’s original afforded almost no airtime to women, a fact that Icke corrects at a stroke by turning the male professor into Dr Ruth Woolf (Juliet Stevenson). She is the founding director of the prestigious Elizabeth Institute, a stern professional with an attitude of “trademark disdain”. The catalyst for the drama is when a 14-year-old, dying of sepsis after a botched at-home abortion, comes into the care of Dr Wolff, who refuses
admittance to a priest (Paul Higgins) when he wishes to administer the last rites. Dr Wolff asserts firmly that her patient’s religious convictions are uncertain and the girl must be left to die in peace.
Arguments and recriminations about religion – Dr Wolff ’s parents were Jewish – are the first to bubble up, followed swiftly by race, gender and education, as various interested parties engage in a ferocious battle, stoked by social media, to stake out the greatest claim of victimhood. In a script note, Icke states that “each actor’s identity should be directly dissonant with their character’s in at least one way”, and he embarks upon a thrilling series of games of theatricality and rug-pulling in which nothing is quite what – or who – it seems. Actresses, for example, suddenly assert their character’s masculinity, whereas a white actor announces “I’m a black man”.
We are, the play says from its slickly impersonal set on a slow revolve, far more complex than a series of simplistic labels. This assertion is underscored by Dr Wolff ’s home life, which comprises two shadowy figures whose truths are revealed only late on.
Stevenson has shone for Icke in two of his previous Almeida productions
(Hamlet and Mary Stuart) and does so again here, in a towering performance that will surely win awards. Stevenson walks the finest of tightropes, brilliantly ensuring that while we sympathise with Dr Wolff ’s impossible predicament, we never warm to her.
Her uncompromising mien starts to crumble and she becomes a rumpled, hounded figure whose certainties are brutally chipped away by detractors on all sides whose personal agendas hold no regard for medical best practice. There’s strong support too from that intriguingly shape-shifting actress Ria Zmitrowicz as a gauche, truth-telling teenager.
Icke’s work is less flashy and more incisive than some of his previous offerings and the result is a piece of theatre of the highest calibre. It is greatly to be hoped that he does not stay away too long.