The Doctor West End review: Juliet Stevenson mesmerises in play for our times
Say the name Juliet Stevenson to those that don’t go to the theatre and it may not mean much – but on the stage, Stevenson has A-List status. In riveting Robert Icke play The Doctor, she lays out every reason why. The piece, which first opened at the Almeida in 2019, is a damning character study on a privileged doctor who is white and British from Jewish heritage. She physically attacks a Black Catholic priest after he attempts to enter a dying girl’s hospital room without the patient’s wishes.
The play instigates so many fiery conversations that by the interval, the room is an unusually fiery pit of debate. Icke has a relatively simple premise that instigates these conversations about the moralites that underpin life and death. He presents as many different character perspectives on stage as he can; from socially conservative Christian backgrounds to people from minority black and brown heritages, each one challenging the beliefs of Stevenson’s doctor Ruth Wolff. As a medical absolutist, Wolff believes “it’s not over until there’s a body,” and that science is the only thing that matters. Her behaviour means a 14-year-old girl doesn’t get last rites by the Catholic church and so in their eyes will go to hell.
As the story breaks in the media and among pressure groups, Icke is able to explore how faith, social media and unconscious bias present different perspectives on what matters most in our final moments, and who gets to choose what happens when we go. Often relying heavily on one shouty conversation after another, in lesser hands it could have all felt too heavy on devices. But it hangs together thanks to Icke’s menacing script, full of stinging barbs, as well as the central performance.
“I’m calm,” Stephenson comically barks, her eyes like lasers, her body contorted by stress like a dead bunch of dead flowers. She’s a familiar contradiction: fiercely self-believing but desperately flawed. Stevenson gets at the impossibility of Wolff’s righteousness with every word, every moment for pause she doesn’t take, every time she circles the stage like an enraged bull. Set designer Hildegard Bechtler has made an ideal bullring out of those comically drab hospital setting out of those depressing fake plastic walls pretending badly to be wood.
Adapted from a 1912 play called Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzle, a welcome contemporary insertion is a young trans girl who lives with Stevenson, and is the only character Wolff properly softens for. In these soft moments, we realise how easy it is to be righteous like Wolff. Whether we like to admit it or not, we’ve all experienced shades of the doctor’s downfall as we all tread increasingly carefully, trying to be sympathetic to the many identities and backgrounds we share this life with. Here is a sharp lesson to keep on listening.
The Doctor plays at the Duke of York’s theatre until 11 December . Read our first The Doctor review from the show’s initial run at the Almeida