THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Robert Icke is one of the greatest directing talents in modern theater and just before he departed as an Associate at the Almeida he wrote and directed this free adaptation which won him Best Director from the Evening Standard Awards. It also, rightly, won prizes for Juliet Stevenson in the title role but the trajectory of the production, like so much else, was hobbled by the pandemic, so only now has it arrived in the West End. It’s been worth the wait and is not to be missed.
It's a provocative and upsetting piece that will hold you totally gripped from the first moments. In short, great theater making.
It centers on Dr Ruth Wolff (Stevenson) an eminent (and Jewish) doctor at a top London clinic who in a heightened moment denies a Catholic (and Black) priest access to a patient, a young girl who is dying of sepsis following a botched self-abortion. The play then explores whether medicine can be the basis of a rational, humanist world view within which identity politics is irrelevant and it presents us with a very modern and familiar scenario - a social media lynching in which a leading institution is torn apart by racial and religious difference, anti-Semitism, careerism and political intrigue.
Schnitzler’s original, pitting Science vs Faith, touched a raw nerve in 1912 and here Icke’s reworking for the modern era practically puts a scalpel to your nerves.
Stevenson who is flinty and commanding brilliantly conveys the slow destruction (or liberation?) of Ruth. Initially, she is merely formidable, obsessed with precise use of language and deploying a barbed wit and lethal intelligence to see off any challengers. Soon social media starts a fire, petitions are launched, and it becomes clear her days are numbered. It won’t ‘blow over’. Icke is great on how all institutions, not just churches, instinctively close ranks and we watch, incredulous, as the clinic does so (until its unity too crumbles) and it all gets out of hand, eventually descending into threats and violence, not helped by a Health Secretary with an eye on ‘the Sundays’ rather than what might be right.
Icke stages a crucial Board meeting as if it was the Battle of Waterloo and cleverly uses a brilliantly percussive drum score (played live on stage by Hannah Ledwidge) to ratchet up the tension. Hildegarde Bechtler’s simple semi-circular domed set with a revolve works perfectly too for a multitude of settings.
The ensemble cast are stunning and, interestingly for a piece specifically about race and gender, it deploys blind casting throughout. This leaves you puzzling, at times, what race are we talking about here but then it dawns on you that’s precisely the point.
One weak spot is a TV ‘debate’ show where Ruth gets stitched up. The intellectual level of this discourse is nowhere near anything you’d find on TV but is used as a dramatic device by Icke to pull together the many social, political and ideological strands from critical race theory and post modernism, which infuse these insane battles. Again, people under duress prove to be far too articulate at moments of crisis here, but at least it maps for the audience the intellectual terrain of the witch hunt.
Icke also fills in with great humanizing touches such as the troubled teen, Sami (a great Matilda Tucker), a neighbor who is a regular confidante of Ruth’s. She provides light relief and anchors the highfalutin’ discussion. He’s also great on the indifferent, casual, bullying of junior doctors, which isn’t even commented on.
This could so easily have fallen into the category of ‘nice middle class radio play’, a play of ideas, but it doesn’t and Icke has managed to animate it so deftly he conceals the great art and craft that has gone into his work.
