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.
Stevenson’s Ruth Wolff is founder and director of a private clinic dedicated to curing Alzheimer’s, but she finds a bed for a teenage girl entering sepsis after a self-administered abortion. Wolff’s refusal to let a black priest administer last rites – leading the girl to die in fear – initially causes a minor (and mostly self-interested) stir among Christian doctors on the staff, and a mere ripple online.
But the ripple spreads. Did Wolff assault the doctor, or use racially charged language? Is her institution biased against Christians or in favour of Jews, women or white people? Is it pro-abortion? Board members and donors to the clinic’s new building get restive, and the mainstream media gets interested. For Wolff, a stickler for procedure, rationality and correct language, an insincere apology is not an option. When she agrees to go on a confrontational TV debate, her chilly self-possession doesn’t play well.
Hildegard Bechtler’s set of a curved, unadorned plywood rear wall and angular clinic furniture increases the sense of exposure. Drummer Hannah Ledwidge sits perched above it, providing a percussive pulse for the action. Scenes at work and at the home Wolff shares with a partner and sometimes with a young friend overlap, at first confusingly, but ultimately to devastating emotional effect. Wolff keeps her private and public selves separate, even when showing a bit of personality or vulnerability might be expedient: when she does let something slip, it’s disastrous.
The central theme of the play is identity, not just in terms of gender, race or religion, but also the spread of X Factor-style “personal stories” to every field, and the loss of self that dementia brings. As at the Almeida, Icke sometimes sets up grievances and opposing belief systems in a way that’s rather obvious, and he also lets most of his characters express themselves in long, shouty speeches (if I were a patient in the clinic, I’d complain about the noise).
But he also seems to think about things 10 times more deeply than most directors, while also possessing a singular control of stagecraft. The revelation of each supporting character’s “real” (ie fictional) ethnicity or gender is done with microscopic skill. I’ve never felt more thoroughly and usefully wrong-footed by a play, even though I’ve seen it before. An Icke production always involves an expansion of the mental horizons.
He won this paper’s Milton Shulman Award for Best Director for The Doctor (and his radical version of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, also at the Almeida) in 2019, and rightly so. There’s no doubt that his production has to work a bit harder in the West End than it did at its first home, where he was an associate director and an established rebooter of classics. But having Stevenson at the top of her game, and his finger on the hot-button issues of the day, still makes this a very potent evening indeed.
Duke of York’s Theatre, to December 11; for tickets visit ES Tickets
