It’s practically criminal that Juliet Stevenson’s last and only appearance on a New York stage took place two decades ago, in a New York City Opera production of A Little Night Music. The veteran British actress, probably best known on these shores for the 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply, makes a triumphant return in the American premiere of Robert Icke’s The Doctor, a very free adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s classic but little seen 1912 drama Professor Bernhardi. For this galvanizing production imported from London by the Park Avenue Armory, Stevenson, who’s onstage every minute (including a good chunk of the intermission, like Ben Platt in Parade), delivers a brilliant tour-de-force turn that demands to be seen.
The plot, although updated to modern times, remains largely the same. Stevenson plays Ruth Wolff, the brilliant head of a medical institute specializing in dementia research who recently admitted an emergency patient, a 14-year-old girl dying of sepsis after a botched, self-induced abortion. Shortly before the girl’s death, a Catholic priest (John Mackay) arrives, saying that the girl’s parents, who are traveling, have contacted him to provide last rites. Wolff, who is a non-practicing Jew, refuses him access to her patient on the grounds that his presence will only upset her and hasten her demise. In the ensuing heated argument, she physically touches the priest, who claims that she violently struck him (the staging leaves it ambiguous).
The imperious Wolff, who brooks no dissent and is firmly convinced that she’s correct in all things, ranging from medical matters to proper grammar, finds herself in a professional and personal free fall as her judgment is called into question by both several of her colleagues and the public at large, the latter demonstrated by an online petition with an ever-growing number of signees calling for her resignation.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
It’s a fairly straightforward, almost melodramatic narrative, with the opening dramatic episode hewing fairly closely to Schnitzler’s play. But Icke — whose previous productions seen at the Armory include Hamlet, Oresteia, and An Enemy of the People — takes the opportunity to expand on the play’s themes, using it as a springboard for a freewheeling examination of anti-Semitism, identity politics and cancel culture, among other issues.
As is often the case with the iconoclastic director’s work, he gets carried away with stylistic flourishes. Some of them are effective, such as the slowly revolving stage in the opening scenes that represents the ground shifting beneath the characters’ feet. Or the drummer (the superb Hannah Ledwiedge) placed in a clear cube high above the stage who provides percussive accompaniment, often resembling the beating of a racing heart. Or Stevenson frantically running around the stage’s large perimeter as her world implodes, like a hamster in a wheel.
More problematically, he’s cast actors who don’t conform to the sex or race of the characters they’re playing, such as the priest, who’s played by a white actor but revealed to be Black much later on only via a strategically placed line of dialogue. Women play men, a character is revealed to be transgender, and so on. We get the idea, that we’re plagued by unconscious biases regarding gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. (there’s even an essay about it in the program, in case you didn’t get the message), but the device is heavy-handed and overly literal despite the fine efforts of the terrific ensemble.
The text, too, becomes overly didactic, especially in a scene in the second act in which Wolff attempts to defend her actions on some sort of television program featuring a panel of self-described experts who lecture her about racism, post-colonialism, gender bias, and the meaning of wokeness. The stilted dialogue lays out the play’s themes so baldly it’s as if we’re watching a dramatized graduate thesis.
But those flaws don’t matter in the face of Stevenson’s towering performance. In the play’s early sections, her character’s angry self-righteousness is almost frightening in its intensity as she verbally mows down anyone who dares to question her. But as Wolff’s life begins to unravel, she seems to deflate, her life force diminishing as her belief system is shattered and she comes to accept her fate. The actress projects every flickering emotion with absolute clarity and an emotional force that will leave you shattered.
