No play in the past 10 years has felt more tense, challenging, and intellectually provoking than this one. Director Robert Icke took Arthur Schnitzler’s obscure 1915 text Professor Bernhardi and turned it into a dazzling analysis of identity, fake news and social-media pile-ons, which begins with a Jewish female doctor refusing a priest access to a dying girl.
Icke’s production, first staged at the Almeida in 2019, features a bracingly rigorous central performance from Juliet Stevenson, while most of the rest of the cast play against their own apparent gender and/or ethnicity, forcing us constantly to question our assumptions and innate prejudices. All this, and it unfolds with the mordant purpose of a thriller too.
