The Doctor
Duke of York’s Theatre, London, until December 11
Juliet Stevenson had to wait all of two and a half years to see The Doctor – a play that the great actress clearly believes in passionately – make its West End transfer from the Almeida Theatre in north London. Such is the backlog in theatreland that the pandemic has created, but it was worth the wait.
This is a clever, knowing play by Robert Icke – very freely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi – that touches on medical and religious ethics, the horror of social media and the media in general, political correctness and how very easy it is these days for even the most reasonable of individuals to find themselves becoming overnight enemies of the people.
Stevenson is on spellbinding form in the title role as a stressed-out medic who turns away a Catholic priest who asks to see a dying girl, and has to spend the rest of her life accounting for that single decision.
It’s interesting how at the Almeida everyone got Icke’s little joke about black people playing white people, white people playing black people and men playing women, but to the Americans next to me it was perplexing.
My only real gripes are the musical accompaniment which, after a while,
sounds very much like a smoke alarm in the background.
I am just not sure, too, if any play should run for almost three hours. That was just about bearable when it had its first run in the much more comfortable Almeida, but in the cramped old Duke of York’s the final 45 minutes were something of an endurance test.
