The Witch Hunt in “The Doctor”

Juliet Stevenson’s voice is one of the most frightening things I ever saw. In April, 2021, with much of New York performance still under pandemic interdict, Simon Stephens’s socially distanced adaptation of José Saramago’s “Blindness” came to the Daryl Roth Theatre. The show was basically a radio drama: audience members sat in pairs six feet apart, wearing headphones, listening to a recording of Stevenson telling a horror story about a plague. Her vocal timbre has a supercompressed quality, as suspenseful as a steel spring. In a dark room, in a dark year, her disembodied voice and its magnificent tension leaped straight to my optic nerve, making phantoms flicker inside my eyelids, sonic energy becoming light.

In “The Doctor,” a British production now at the Park Avenue Armory, the in-the-flesh Juliet Stevenson (a compact ramrod in the Glenda Jackson mold) maintains that sense of matter under strain. Wisely, her director-playwright, Robert Icke, exploits it every way he can. The two-hour-and-forty-five-minute show keeps Stevenson onstage for almost its entire length, even during the intermission—the minimalist gray carpeted turntable stage, designed by Hildegard Bechtler, rotates, slowly, beneath her feet. (The room is her autoclave.) A voice like Stevenson’s can make an argument take on heat and power, thrust and excitement. Of course, the wheels might fall off that argument. The play might grind itself into the dirt. But Stevenson’s motive force keeps pushing the thing whether it moves or not, combative energy becoming, somehow, pure fight.

Icke’s play is a loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 “Professor Bernhardi,” an Ibsenish drama about a man of science—straight-talking, unliked, righteous—betrayed by popular opinion and selfish colleagues. (This outline might seem familiar from “An Enemy of the People,” an actual Ibsen play, also adapted by Icke, that was performed at the Armory in 2021.) Schnitzler’s setup sounds modern: a Jewish doctor at a prestigious Viennese clinic refuses to allow a priest into a patient’s room; the doctor would prefer she die in a drugged euphoria, unaware that she’s near death. Details point to a botched abortion (Schnitzler was also a doctor, and had a lover who may have died this way), and Bernhardi is sparing her—or possibly denying her—a last chance to seek absolution.

Icke borrows Schnitzler’s inciting conflict, including the illicit abortion, and also the ensuing firestorm of anti-Semitism, government cowardice, office-hierarchy jockeying, and anti-élitist fervor. In “The Doctor,” though, Bernhardi has been transmuted into Ruth Wolff (Stevenson), a tart and gifted founder of a dementia clinic, whose partner—and this is unknown to her co-workers—has been struck down with the condition. Icke’s adaptation piles yet more pressures on Ruth. The dead girl in the hospital bed was only fourteen; the clinic’s executive committee can’t stop shouting about whether Ruth is being arrogant or principled in standing her ground (“Yell yell bang bang,” I wrote, helpfully, in my notes); and bigots paint a swastika on her car and kill her cat. Somehow, even after that, Ruth’s name is mud, and she appears on a nightmarish television panel show, in which a smorgasbord of activists tell her she’s racist, too feminist, colonialist, an abortionist, anti-Christian, and a hypocrite. “I don’t go in for groups,” Ruth says, in that coiled voice, as a camera projects her rigid countenance.

Icke clearly wants to turn Schnitzler’s prophetic drama into a state-of-the-world debate—exposing not just the venality of Ruth’s fellow-doctors, such as the self-serving Hardiman (Naomi Wirthner), but also a larger panic around identity politics. Should a doctor have made an end-of-life, faith-adjacent decision for her patient if she does not share the patient’s religion? In order to keep that question before us, Icke sweeps other, more obvious worries under the (slowly rotating) rug.

Icke’s specifics of pastoral care seem a bit fuzzy here, since the let-the-priest-in contingent never concede that he would have spent his time badgering the dying girl about Hell. And certainly no one thinks to ask, “Should Ruth really have admitted an emergency patient to a dementia clinic?” or “What about police protection?” or “Who impregnated that fourteen-year-old?” Crimes are stacking up in Icke’s narrative, but he ignores them so that he can rail at cancel culture: “people sitting in their back bedrooms and screaming into the Internet” who might keep good-hearted but high-handed professionals from doing their jobs. (It’s not a mere thumb-on-the-scale issue. By the time a caricature of a Black activist tried to bait Ruth into saying the N-word on air—why?—I had worked out that Icke wasn’t too concerned with good-faith argument.)

Icke’s innovative gesture, staging-wise, has nothing to do with that glacially rotating turntable, or with the rock-god drummer who plays in a window high above the stage. It has to do with his casting strategy—which provides a way of pacing the audience’s thinking while emphasizing (apparently) his point that we shouldn’t equate identity with moral suasion. Ruth is a white woman, and Stevenson is, too. But the other roles seem to be cast contra-gender—the executive committee includes two women playing men—or contra-race. (The text notes that, apart from in the TV scene, “each actor’s identity should be directly dissonant with their character’s.”)

This dissonance is sometimes sprung, deliberately, on the audience. For instance, John Mackay, a white actor, plays the priest, and it is only many scenes in, after characters have interrogated Ruth about her possible unconscious bias, that we understand that the priest is actually Black. In this way, Icke pre-punches the ballot for both candidates: when Ruth says she did not perceive the priest’s skin color, we sympathize; but, when we remember that she called him “uppity,” we wonder, Is she racist or did she misspeak? The risk, of course, is that this treatment turns everyone other than Ruth into a reflection of her perceptual world. The secondary cast, none of whom can stand against a gale-force Stevenson, becomes more like a set of mouthpieces than like fully dimensional figures. And nearly three hours is a long time to spend with only one real person, who keeps getting attacked by straw men.

So what’s this argument really all about—the conflict between faith and science? I suspect it might not be, despite the text’s statements to the contrary, because of where Icke and his drama finish up. In “The Doctor,” Icke leans repeatedly on the idea of a witch hunt. He begins and (almost) ends the play with Ruth saying, “Which”—and then pausing portentously, so that we hear the homonym hanging in the air. Schoolkids refer to Ruth’s house as a witch’s cottage, and Icke does seem interested in the way old fairy tales encode old hatreds: the revulsion for the person who lives outside the village, say, or for the knowledgeable woman.

But what about the show’s own knee-jerk hatred of the public? I’m chilled by Icke’s switch from Schnitzler’s cool-eyed diagnosis of anti-Semitism to simplistic grievances about language policing. Icke even has to invent an outsized, manifestly unfair suspension for Ruth, so that we can be furious that someone so valuable should be thrust aside for a gaffe. (Such sidelining is less an issue that faces doctors, and more something that might haunt entrenched cultural power players—directors, perhaps, who find themselves in the spotlight.)

Ruth talks to the priest in the final scene, and they do manage to find common ground: contempt for those who point out bad behavior via social media. “Jesus didn’t live in the digital age,” the priest says. Ruth responds, “We crucify them differently now.” Stevenson’s voice is so strong, even as it grows sentimental in the play’s final moments, and you can hear the incredible steel spring relaxing. But this time I didn’t see phantoms under my eyelids. I saw something uglier—a play of ideas being sabotaged by reactionary self-pity. ♦