Theatre: The Doctor
Almeida Theatre, London, N1 (020-7359 4404). Until 28 September Running time: 2hrs 50mins
As his “leaving present” to the Almeida, the theatre’s young associate director, Robert Icke, offers this terrific adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 play
Professor Bernhardi, for which he also wrote the script, said Paul Taylor in The Independent. Schnitzler’s play, set in turn-ofthe-century Vienna, is a brilliant dissection of the clash between science and faith, and of the anti-Semitism “growing like gangrene in Austrian society”. It tells the story of a Jewish doctor who treats a 14-year-old girl dying of sepsis following a botched abortion – and who controversially refuses to let a Catholic priest come to her bedside to administer the last rites. But in Icke’s reworking, the piece becomes a “gripping moral thriller and a scorching examination of our age”, said Sarah Hemming in the FT. The core plot remains, but with a female protagonist, Dr Ruth Woolf; and the focus on anti-Semitism broadens out to embrace issues of gender, race, class, identity politics – and trial by Twitter – to make this a “devastating play for today”.
Icke is the “brightest directing talent British theatre has produced in a generation”, said Fiona Mountford in The Daily Telegraph; and in his hands this stunning piece has the feel of an intellectual thriller. In an added layer of intrigue, the director embarks upon a “thrilling series of games of theatricality and rug-pulling”, suddenly revealing, for example, that an actress is playing a male character, or a white actor a black man. And the ethical debates it provokes about medicine, mortality and culture wars, said Sam Marlowe in The Times, make for “deft and disturbing” theatre.
At times “fiercely funny”, the play is well served by its superb cast, said Sarah Crompton on What’s On Stage. Ria Zmitrowicz is “truthfully touching” as the doctor’s teenage friend and Naomi Wirthner “positively terrifying as her odious rival”. But it is Juliet Stevenson who “towers over the evening” in a magnificent performance as Dr Woolf herself. Stevenson brilliantly registers each moment of Woolf’s decline from “powerful leader, in charge of her world and her emotions, to the haunted and hunted tragic figure she becomes”. It’s an “astonishing, gripping” evening.