Let me start with a simple, clear and unequivocal statement. As his swansong at the Almeida, Robert Icke has delivered a first class modern production of a timeless classic with an outstanding lead performance from Juliet Stevenson. Try to see it if you can although lightning fast fingers on the internet button at 1.00 pm every Tuesday is your only chance. All other tickets are sold out for the run to the end of September. Almost all human life and dilemmas are here – almost too many, in fact – as it tackles such intense subjects as dying, caring, grieving, choosing, oppressing, resisting and struggling for recognition in a sometimes heavy bombardment. With large slices of racial prejudice, identity politics, medical ethics, populist witch-hunts, (trans) gender tensions and digital rebellion thrown in. It presses so many buttons around the debate between professional standards and internet-driven public irreverence that metaphorical lights are flashing at every turn.
Arthur Schnitzler’s original 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi” focused prophetically upon the rising anti-semitism in Austria and how it destroyed the career of a brilliant Jewish doctor. This version has freely updated the title, the setting and the script to a gleaming modern clinic whose Jewish founder/director Ruth Wolff operates with “crystal clear” (her mantra) efficiency and professionalism to uphold the highest standards of patient care. In the incident which triggers the whole drama (her denying access for a Catholic priest to administer the last rites to a sensitive teenage patient close to death), there is never any doubt that she reacts with clear, irrefutable logic to protect the interests of her patient and in line with her best knowledge of the patient’s wishes. But the tribal Catholic-Jewish witch-hunt which subsequently goes viral on digital media throws up sufficiently varying interpretations of that moment to surprise us into wondering about her motives, prejudices and human empathy.
The dominant theme remains the original one from a century ago. How moral society crumbles when popular prejudice subverts professional practice and ethics. Scroll on to the digital age and that can take in a near endless range of toxic as well as viral populist campaigns to which our natural reaction (as well as that of those doctors who defend Ruth) is outrage at such trivialisation of medical treatment. This modern production uses sundry riffs around the theme of woke accessibility to create a regular undercurrent of witty one-liners on use of language and erosion of standards. Not all at the expense of the trivialisers – Ruth’s precise but often pedantic corrections of logic and language in conversation expose her lack of perspective at times. But for all these witty jibes at Ruth’s controlling spirit, the balance of sympathy lies with her and her fellow defenders of rigour, standards and identity-blind practice. Which is where the hints of a grumpy diatribe sneak in.
Indeed, they do more than sneak in. A powerful outburst at a clinic board meeting by Ruth’s main supporter which closes the first act could, as Guy put, “have come straight out of a Jordan Peterson lecture”. This impression is reinforced in the second act as a panel of caricature torch bearers for identity groups quiz Ruth about her actions in a television debate. Much of the wit at their expense is straight out of the familiar anti-PC joke book. This is the weakest point in the play where it succumbs to the sort of “straw man” targetting of progressive stereotypes seen more frequently in the Spectator magazine than in the theatrical temple to Islington liberalism. It is a weird point of reversal in the normal way of things – quite fun for that reason but still lowering the quality and originality of the overall performance.
All is forgiven and almost forgotten in the searing half hour of personal revelation which follows that TV grilling and closes the play in a quiet, still but heart-rending series of conversations between Ruth, her partner, her young friend and the priest. The latter could so easily have become just another expose of the age-old debate between science and religion but instead kept us riveted to the emotional depths, dilemma and distress of both.
And somehow in all of that I have omitted to mention the play’s boldest move which may well turn out to have greater impact than all the other themes combined. Robert Icke has broken the barriers of cross-gender and cross-race casting in a way which initially mystifies and then hits harder and harder with every twist and turn of the dialogue at our prejudices on both counts. And I really do mean “breaks the barriers”. It twists and reverses the casting identities with a series of surprises and reveals which keep on giving throughout the second act and are integral to the underlying theme of labels and Dr Wolff’s other mantra – “I am a doctor. That’s all.” I shall never look at theatrical casting with such blinkers ever again.
View from the Clapham Omnibus 