Juliet Stevenson in The Doctor
(Picture: Manuel Harlan)It’s slightly ironic that Juliet Stevenson weathered a two-year pandemic delay to transfer Robert Icke’s extraordinary play The Doctor to the West End, only to fall ill on its pre-London tour.
A chest infection kept the 65-year-old actress out of a week of performances at Richmond Theatre, prior to its transfer to the Duke of York’s Theatre on St Martin’s Lane. “I’m so sorry I let them down, because I never think I can’t manage a show,” she says, fully recovered when we meet at her home. “I’ve performed with a temperature and a broken hand…” It was all the more galling as the part of the titular physician, Ruth Wolf, is “the role of a lifetime”.
