When the physician and writer Arthur Schnitzler completed his medical drama Professor Bernhardi in 1912, insulin and heart valve surgery were not available to patients whose lives might have been saved by them, and Schnitzer’s fellow Austrian native Adolf Hitler had not yet moved to Germany. The play, which traces the fallout when a Jewish doctor denies a Catholic priest access to a dying patient, featured only one, minor female character.
More than a century later, the British director and writer Robert Icke has “very freely,” in his words, adapted Schnitzler’s work, taking into account both the horrors and progress that unfolded in the decades after its premiere and our current, fraught socio-political climate. The result, The Doctor—now making its New York premiere, following acclaimed runs at London’s Almeida Theatre and on the West End—is at once a wicked parody and a pitch-black rumination on enduring bigotry and identity politics, with the latter presented as a most imperfect cure for the first condition.
Professor Bernhardi has been replaced by Dr. Ruth Wolff, founding director of the Elizabeth Institute, a private, donor-funded facility contained in an English hospital. Played by the formidable stage and screen veteran Juliet Stevenson, Ruth is defined by her inability to suffer foolishness—even improper grammar can raise her ire—and, especially, her utter certainty in the powers of her vocation. Over the play’s two acts, she uses the term “crystal clear” no fewer than ten times; on each occasion, Stevenson utters the words like a sacred mantra.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Ruth’s faith in medicine, and in her own ethical integrity, come into conflict with organized religion early in the play, when a 14-year-old Catholic girl arrives at the institute with terminal sepsis, brought on by a botched attempt to abort the fetus inside her. A man claiming to be a priest sent by the patient’s parents arrives, intent on delivering last rites to absolve the teenager of her sins. Ruth, a secular Jew—her own parents were more pious, we learn—argues she has been given no indication that the semi-conscious girl is herself religious, and doesn’t want to consign her to an “unpeaceful death.”
A confrontation ensues, during which the patient dies, and in the days that follow the institute and Ruth come under increasing scrutiny, fueled by social media and bearing the unmistakable stench of anti-Semitism. Ruth’s own colleagues are divided, with both her deputy director and an outspoken young doctor opposing her. The deputy, one Professor Hardiman, a sniveling creature captured with unctuous precision by Naomi Wirthner, goes so far as to propose that “certain types of patient need certain types of doctors”—suggesting, essentially, that the teenager might have been better served by a Catholic physician.
One of Ruth’s staunch defenders, who shares her ethnicity, responds with a ferociously eloquent tirade against our contemporary obsession with identity, one of numerous brave, beautifully written passages that Icke has provided here. “Last time we chopped up the world into identity groups, let’s remember where that road led—with tattoos on people’s wrists,” Dr. Copley, played with scorching dignity by Chris Osikanlu Colquhoun, concludes. “And as a Jew, I get to make that point.”
Notably, Hardiman, a male character, is played by a woman, and Colquhoun is an actor of color, though Copley is clearly white. Icke has cast a number of other actors in roles whose race or gender differ from their own, a choice that seems intended to underline the limitations and dangers of defining human beings by such factors. Granted, it’s disconcerting, even confusing, to discover that a couple of characters belong to racial minorities only after they’ve been fleshed out in other respects. You might also be distracted by the melodramatic sound design, by Tom Gibbons, which sets ominous, percussive music—from a drummer on the vast stage—buzzing and droning under much of the dialogue.
Icke has also given Ruth a romantic partner, Charlie, whose gender is left unspecified. While movingly played by Juliet Garricks, the character seems to exist largely to humanize the protagonist, as does a youth who periodically pops up in the couple’s house like a spirit, made endearing by an edgy, tender Matilda Tucker.
The production is nonetheless riveting throughout its two-and-a-half hour duration (minus an intermission), thanks to Icke’s probing, virtuosic text and his superb cast. Stevenson leads the latter with a mix of fire and transparency, making Ruth’s dedication and irascibility and arrogance and compassion mesmerizing, and her inevitable defeat crushing. In one particularly potent, hilarious scene, Ruth consents to a television interview and finds herself interrogated by a panel of specialists, each purporting to represent a community or special interest.
“I don’t go in for groups,” Ruth sniffs at one point, to which one panelist, who introduces herself as “a researcher and the chair of a nationally recognized campaign group for the understanding of unconscious bias,” responds, “Society groups us—that’s the thing it does.” The researcher is something of a modern cliché; her manner and much of what she says are deliberately irritating. But here, at least, she’s not wrong. In recognizing the complexity of our moment in history and seizing on its dramatic potential, The Doctor delivers blazing and deeply therapeutic entertainment.
The Doctor opened June 14, 2023, at the Park Avenue Armory and runs through August 19. Tickets and information: armoryonpark.org
