Created by Robert Icke
Based on Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler (1912)
Set design by Hildegard Bechtler
Theatre Royal, Bath
Saturday 17th September 2022, 14.30
CAST
Juliet Stevenson – Dr Wolff
with
Chris Osikanlu Colquhoun – Copley
Doña Croll – Cyprian
Juliet Garricks – Charlie
Preeya Kalidas- Flint
Mariah Louca – Roberts
John Mackay- Father
Daniel Rabin – Murphy
Matilda Tucker- Sami
Naomi Wirther – Hardima
Sabrina Wu – Junior
MUSIC
Hannah Ledwige – drummer
Annoyingly, nearly all the photos online are the Almeida cast, which is about half different. I’ve avoided them unless the characters are in this production.
You couldn’t have got in to see this at Islington’s highly-subsidised Almeida Theatre – this sort of production virtually sells out to “Friends / Members”, as do similar at Chichester’s Minerva. We’re Friends at Chichester, but the Almeida is too far away for us to join the club. So now it’s paying a fleeting visit to Bath Theatre Royal prior to a West End run at the Duke of York’s Theatre- have they thought of changing the theatre’s name?
The play is ‘created’ by Robert Icke, but based on Professor Bernhardi, by Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler. Professor Bernhadi is one of Michael Billington’s select 101 Greatest Plays, and prior to Lockdown, theatres seemed to be working through his list. It was written in 1912, and Schnitzler was part of the Viennese pre-1914 intellectual blossoming (Freud, Einstein, Schiele, Klimt). We have just returned from Vienna and saw the Vienna 1900 exhibition at the Leopold’s Museum. Schnitzler was the son of doctors and medically-qualified himself, though he stopped practising to write. Professor Bernhardi was banned in Vienna, and so first performed in Berlin. The ban was based on the anti-Semitism theme (Professor Bernhadi in the play was the Austrian Dreyfus) rather than the sexual theme. Schnitzler was Jewish, and lived in Leopoldstadt. Michael Billington’s article points out that it was so excessively long that it had to be played with three intervals. It was described as a ‘comedy.’ Fortunately, Robert Icke’s creator role brings The Doctor in at 2 hours 55 minutes, including the 15 minute interval.
It’s the third play this year on religion v humanism (broadly speaking), following Doubt and The Southbury Child at Chichester. We are equidistant from Bath and Chichester, both are 65 miles away. However, Chichester is a much easier drive, all on dual carriageways, against the beautiful Dorset countryside either side on the way to Bath. I noticed that tickets at £46.50 plus £2.50 booking fee compare unfavourably with Chichester Minerva just two days earlier at £32 for The Narcissist. Chichester had a more elaborate set, the same sized cast and has a smaller capacity, so I guess the Bath price is based on the play’s proven success. It’s still a bargain. It’ll cost twice as much for premium seats in London a week or so later. The Almeida run was 2019, where it was in the awards shortlists for Best Play, Best Director and Best Actress. It got five star reviews, but its inevitable shift to the West End was stymied by Lockdown.
The plot- briefly. Dr Ruth Wolff is the director of the Elizabeth Clinic (named in the original play after the Empress of Austria, but it works just as well in contemporary Britain). She’s a researcher on Alzheimers, but a fourteen year old girl is brought in as an emergency suffering from sepsis after a botched home abortion from pills bought on the internet. She is certain to die. A Catholic priest turns up, having been asked by her parents who are abroad to see the girl and give her the last rites. Dr Wolff refuses him entry. The girl does not know she’s dying, and she wants her to die in peace. The girl has not mentioned she’s Catholic, and Dr Wolff says the appearance of the priest will terrify her. She physically restrains the priest from entering. The girl dies.
The medical faculty is divided on her decision and it all becomes public and it spreads to a mass petition to remove her. She resigns. At home, she has a partner Charlie and a teenage visitor, Sami. I’m not going to plot spoil on their significance.
In Act two the anti-Semitism has reached attacks on her home and a swastika daubed on her car. Ruth Wolff is invited to a TV debate. The rest of the cast switch from fellow doctors to interrogators … specialists on anti-abortion, racism and ‘Woke’ bias. This is done with Dr Wolff back to the audience, her face in tight close up projected by a live camera on stage onto two large screens. I’ve mentioned how live camera feeds on stage is the 2022 ‘must have.’ The Almeida was doing it in 2019. Also online this year many complain that the Woke debate / Woke as a negative word is a recent Daily Mail invention. Not so. The word is debated at length here in a 2019 production which must have been well under way in 2018. An ongoing theme is that Ruth Wolff is a stickler for formal grammar and correct choice of word … she rails against who instead of whom (well out of date in Britain, though US editors still worry about it), me and I, and the misuse of literally.This insistence on precise words comes back at her. A political theme from the original is that a doctor she mentored has become a cabinet minister, presumably Minister for Health. While the minister is supportive in Part One, she turns on Dr Wolff (throws her to the wolves?) in Part Two.
The ending is poignant. No plot spoilers again.
The set has a long bench set on a stage within a curved semi-circular wall with an electrically-operated door at the back. The drummer is place high above. It sits in a revolve stage, which is not used for set changing but for changing that long bench to different angles. The curved sides act as projection panels for the live video feed of close ups in the TV debate in Part Two. It’s not many years ago that elite theatres boasted of their elaborate built-in revolve stages, but now there seems to be a portable system that sits on top of existing stages anywhere.
Robert Icke says it’s NOT colour blind and NOT gender blind, but insisted on precise ethnicities and gender for the actors he cast. This is the confusing aspect. It took me a while to work out that the BAME women playing Brian and Roger, are supposed to be men. Even longer to work out they’re supposed to be white men. Then it took much longer before Dr Wolff is accused of racism because the priest was a black man. But the actor playing the priest is white. Then the Catholic doctor, Paul, who is a white actor, declares that he’s the only non-white person in the room. To add to the confusion, “Father” is the same actor for both the Priest and the violent Scottish accented father of the dead girl. As the priest, he is supposed to be black. One of the attacks on Dr Woolf is that she has appointed a Jewish woman to a new promotion, and declined to appoint a black man. She says she’s gender blind, but is asked why 65% of her staff are female. (A reversal of the usual discussion). This refers back to Schnitzler’s original play where it is pointed out that the patients in Viennese private clinics were mainly Catholic, but 85% of the doctors were Jewish.
The teenager Sami is played by a female actor, but then in the TV debate it’s suggested they are a male identifying as female … which might make sense when Sami describes having sex with a boy at school and taking along a dress and ‘other things’ for the occasion. The boy turns on Sami, presumably on discovering Sami is male. The Kinks song Lola springs to mind. (Phew, managed those sentences without using he or she). Dr Wolff’s partner, Charlie, is played by a female actor, but only ever described as ‘partner.’ Dt Wolff declines to reply when the debate questioners ask if she’s gay. I still have no idea of Charlie’s intended gender in the story, and assume that’s intentional.
The play is a moral maze, but also an identity maze. People are the colour and gender they “identify as” which for half the cast is different to reality (except as interrogators, when they become the colour and gender they really are.)
I think a programme explanation of the intention would help, though I suppose Icke wants us to be confronted with confusion. We discussed this at length. Karen thought it was too clever by half, and suggests while it may play in Islington, a less Woke audience would simply be irritated at the confusion. It’s not helped by mainly hearing first names and having a programme with surnames. What’s the point? Why not have people play in their true gender and ethnicity?
We really want to read the play, though Amazon.uk is advertising end of October delivery- six to seven weeks. Even the ‘used’ copy is two weeks. Why? I understand reprinting for the West End run, but why are used and reseller copies so slow? We’ll be in London soon, and I’d guess the National Theatre bookshop will have it in stock. The discussions it provokes will go on. At the end, the priest is conciliatory. To a degree her insistence that she is a doctor working on purely medical reasons is her downfall. Just like the church, she has set herself up as a judge and jury, but she cannot see that.
It’s extremely good, and I’m not one for long debates on stage. You can see why Juliet Stevenson hoovered up the Best Actress awards for 2019 too. She is never off stage, and stays sitting motionless for half of the interval while our drummer does a 15 minute solo. Incidentally, a drummer on stage accenting action goes back to Peter Brooks” A Midsummer Night’s Dream, except that Peter Brooks had two drummers. They also use recorded music through speeches, which can be annoying at times as sound at Bath is not great.
Who am I to disagree with Michael Billington’s 2019 rating?
Yes. Five stars for me. Karen would deduct one for the elitism of the deliberate confusion.
*****
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
five star
Michael Billington, The Guardian ***** (Almeida 2019)
All of this is debated with fierce clarity. Icke, following Schnitzler, shows his protagonist as a victim without totally exculpating her. This double vision is magnificently captured by Stevenson. She shows Ruth to be brusque, politically naive and intolerant of other people’s failings, especially when it comes to the misuse of language. But while Stevenson shows how integrity can turn into obduracy, she also beautifully portrays the human cost of making medicine one’s god. Her features look memorably pained when seen in closeup during a hostile TV encounter, and she confronts the sacrifice of her relations with her lover and a transgender teenager with an unbearable sense of loss. This consummate performance shows Ruth in all her complexity.
Michael Billington, The Guardian, 21 August 2019
Sarah Crompton (What’s On Stage) ***** (Almeida 2019)
Sam Marlowe, The Times ***** (Almeida 2019)
Fiona Mountford, The Telegraph ***** (Almeida 2019)
Stevenson walks the finest of tightropes, brilliantly ensuring that while we sympathise with Dr Wolff’s impossible predicament, we never warm to her, much less like her. Her uncompromising mien starts to crumble and she becomes a rumpled, hounded figure whose certainties are brutally chipped away by detractors on all sides whose personal agendas hold no regard for medical best practice.
Fiona Mountford, The Telegraph 21 August 2019
four star
Paul Taylor, The Independent **** (Almeida 2019)
Susannah Clapp, The Observer **** (Almeida 2019)
Nick Curtis, The Standard, **** (Almeida 2019)
RosemaryWaugh, The Stage **** (Almeida 2019)
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
ROBERT ICKE
Hamlet, Almeida 2017 (filmed)
Romeo & Juliet,Headlong 2012
JULIET STEVENSON
Hamlet, Almeida 2017 (filmed) (Gertrude)
DANIEL RABIN
The Winter’sTale, Wanamaker 2016
Pericles, Wanamaker 2016
King John, Globe 2015
Peter Viney's Blog 
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