The Doctor will see you now
Robert Icke signs off at the Almeida with his best adaptation and a five-star performance from Juliet Stevenson
Michael Billington admires stellar shows at the Almeida and Donmar
ROBERT ICKE, in his time as associate director at the Almeida, has made a practice of rewriting the classics. His efforts have been greeted with ecstasy by the majority of critics and deep scepticism by me. However, I’m happy to admit that his version of The Doctor, freely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi, is a deserved success. It also boasts a performance in the title role by Juliet Stevenson that reminds us why she is in the front rank of British actors.
I have long admired Schnitzler’s original play, first staged in 1912, for its scathing portrait of Viennese anti-semitism. What
Schnitzler shows is a Jewish doctor mercilessly vilified for refusing a Catholic priest permission to administer the last rites to a patient. Although Mr Icke retains Schnitzler’s premise, he updates it to embrace issues of race, gender and class.
His protagonist, Ruth Wolff, is a secular Jew who runs a prestigious institute specialising in Alzheimer’s. When she prevents a black priest from seeing a 14-year-old girl dying from a self-administered abortion, she’s attacked not only for her medical arrogance, but for being a white, godless woman.
A German dramatist once argued that, in a good play, everyone is right. What is striking about Mr Icke’s adaptation is its ability to see all points of view. You sympathise with Ruth’s professional rigour, her refusal to surrender to toxic abuse on social media and her resistance to her enemies on the institute’s executive committee.
At the same time, Ruth uses inflammatory language to the priest, naively pretends that medicine can be detached from public life and, in a televised debate with her opponents, is shown to be ready to play identity politics when it suits her. But, in a moving final encounter, shrewdly lifted from Schnitzler, we see that the doctor and the priest have more in common than they realise.
It’s a play that appeals to both head and heart and Miss Stevenson is quite brilliant. She has the single-minded intensity of a woman who regards medicine as a calling rather than a profession. However, her features, when seen in relentless close-up during the debate, register a pained bewilderment and, at the last, she confronts the heavy personal price she has paid for her dedication. This is great acting.
The production, which casts actors against the conventions of race and gender, gets fine performances from Paul Higgins as the impassioned priest, Naomi Wirthner as Ruth’s fiercest opponent and Ria Zmitrowicz
In a good play everyone is right. Robert Icke’s adaptation is striking in its ability to see all points of view
as a friend whom she unwittingly betrays. At the climax, Mr Icke arguably introduces one issue too many, but his farewell production at the Almeida turns out to be far and away his best.
The Donmar Warehouse, often linked with the Almeida as one of London’s most high-powered small spaces, is also enjoying a success with Appropriate, a work by Branden Jacobsjenkins who in An Octoroon, based on a 19th-century Dion Boucicault melodrama, questioned what it meant to be dubbed ‘a black playwright’.
He takes the process a stage further here by appropriating the stock form of the American family drama made famous by Eugene O’neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. The result is searing and satirical, gravely serious and mordantly funny.
Mr Jacobs-jenkins presents us with a dysfunctional family gathering at their late father’s old plantation home in Arkansas to sort out their debt-ridden inheritance. Where there’s a will, there’s a play and, predictably, the three siblings squabble.
Much of the action hinges on the discovery of a photo album that suggests that the father, a supposedly liberal lawyer, was actually a closet racist morbidly obsessed by pictures of lynchings and dead black people.
The play’s point is not unfamiliar—that any old, big house in the Deep South is haunted by its association with slavery—but there’s verve and wit in the writing and Ola Ince’s production contains another stellar performance by a female actor. Monica Dolan, the eldest sibling, is memorably bilious and abrasive, yet suggests that her verbal cruelty conceals a thwarted longing for love.
She’s strongly supported by Steve Mackintosh as the middle child who thinks only of dollar signs and by Edward Hogg as the youngest, who has the faintly manic quality of the reformed addict. It’s a play that entertains even as it disturbs.
Finally, a recommendation of The Secret River, which looks in briefly at the National Theatre after a spell at the Edinburgh Festival. Adapted by Andrew Bovell from a novel by Australian writer Kate Grenville, this is a Sydney Theatre Company production that tells the story of the collision, in the early 19th century, between white settlers and indigenous Australians. It’s a tragic tale showing how a transported English convict, rejected by his own society, appropriates fertile farmland belonging to the native Darug people.
What is impressive about Neil Armfield’s production is its controlled pace and rhythm and its ability to suggest that we’re watching both a piece of Australian history and the re-enactment of a timeless colonial story. The Edinburgh audience with whom I saw it sat engrossed for three hours and I would urge anyone who can to catch it. ‘The Doctor’, until September 28 (020–7359 4404); ‘Appropriate’, until October 5 (020– 3282 3808); ‘The Secret River’, until September 7 (020–7452 3000).