The Doctor is The Almeida’s associate director Robert Icke’s swansong, and what a swansong it is.
If Juliet Stevenson sprinting around The Almeida’s stage as she descends into full blown despair doesn’t go down as one of the year’s theatrical highlights, something’s up.
The play is based on a piece written by Arthur Schnitzler in 1912, Professor Bernhardi, but Icke has put his trademark twist on the script and brought it up to date with a flurry of discussion about social media, virtue signalling, and use of words like ‘woke’. The ethical discussion remains the same as in Schnitzler’s play: who should have more power over a patient, a priest or a doctor? The original play, set in 1900’s Vienna, showed the creeping growth of anti-semitism in the capital, and Icke’s script brings that depressingly still relevant storyline to the 21st century.
The premise is simple: atheist —though culturally-Jewish—doctor Ruth Wolff (Stevenson) bars a priest from giving a dying 14-year-old girl her last rites because, she argues, there’s no proof she’s religious. This creates a media storm where we see heated boardroom discussions, a sharp padded shoulder-suited PR director marching between scenes, and a ‘cult’ of doctors trying to cling on to funding for a new hospital extension.
“The deep, unsettling tension demands attention at all times.”
The play asks a lot of questions. At times it can feel like the audience has been planted slap-bang in the middle of a lecture on ethics, but it’s done so well that to be so rigorously pummelled intellectually is part of the pleasure of this piece. That said, The Doctor is such a true-to-form, texturally challenging, tense play, that perhaps pleasure is the wrong word. What’s without doubt is that the entire cast is at the absolute top of their game. The quietness of the play is amplified by sudden, rare shouts or cries. It’s pitch perfect.
The tension is high from the beginning, and rarely lets up. The very first scene grabs the audience when Stevenson approaches the edge of the stage and engages in a one-way conversation with what we assume is an emergency services telephone operator as she reports a dead body.
The minimal set allows zero distraction from the multiple plot lines, and all the bells and whistles can be found in the beautiful acting and the deep, unsettling tension that demands attention at all times.
“There are few plays that hold an audience so breathless and so captivated throughout…”
And the audience needs to focus because the two issues at the heart of the play are complex. The first—whether medical ethics should take precedence over religion—dominates the first half of the play. The second half explores identity politics, and questions whether anyone can really only belong to one ‘tribe’. In Wolff’s case, she rejects her Jewishness, her whiteness and her gender, and says she belongs to no group other than being a doctor. At one point the doctor is challenged by a beautifully staged TV panel who point out that because of her privilege, she is able to reject belonging to these other groups.
Anyone watching The Doctor will recognise flashes of reality from recent debates and news discussions, and that’s what makes it so brilliant, and so tense, and so utterly terrifying. There are few plays that hold an audience so breathless and so captivated throughout – but The Doctor is one of them.
The Doctor runs at the Almeida until 28 September.
Words by Eleanor Ross.