What theatre can be: The Doctor at the Almeida
The Doctor
Almeida Theatre
Circle E23, £20
4 September 2019
Almeida page
Could theatre be forgiven after David Mamet’s Bitter Wheat? Fortunately I couldn’t have had a more serendipitous follow-up to mop away the displeasure and make a case for the art than The Doctor. Rob Icke’s latest is as intelligent, nuanced, challenging and open-ended as his productions always are, and a welcome reminder of the potential of theatre to expand and enrich.
The character flaws and inconsistencies of Juliet Stephenson’s doctor are what I have thought most about. She is interpretable as a stereotype: a cold logician, a grammar nazi, a fierce opponent to the emotion-driven witch-hunts of social media. But her first appearance is not one of cold statement of fact; she is lost, confused. We’ll later learn she’s reporting her partner’s suicide. Early on in the play, after her ‘cold logician’ persona has been established, she mentions the doctor’s dilemma, that in a hundred years’ time her treatments will seem barbaric – suggesting her conviction is not out of egoism but necessity.
The seeds have been sown for the play’s showpiece, a televised debate where the doctor must defend actions that have led to a public scandal. She does two things here that perplexed me. Her use of the word ‘uppity’ is accused for its racist overtones and a comparison is made to the n-word. She is asked, why not say that word, if it just a word? In my head I argued that the racist implications of that word are far greater than of the word ‘uppity’, such that the word cannot be used by a white person except with the intention to cause harm. Not the case for ‘uppity’, surely. But the doctor falls silent. Does she not see the argument? Is she shocked or offended at the comparison? Do the high stakes of her predicament become suddenly clear? Is her silence consistent with the character that has been formed for her, of a ruthless advocate of reason?
The second thing is her reference, on live television, to a young friend, the doctor’s only friend as far as we have been shown. The doctor describes her friend as a woman born in a man’s body, who thankfully now ‘has a choice’. How could she be so insensitive as to out her friend without permission, on television? How could she be so insensitive as to describe her friend’s behaviour as a choice? Is this consistent with the thoughtful, caring doctor we have seen her to be?
Inconsistencies bother me, but I have to allow that these are most likely intentional, and most likely are particularly sophisticated manifestations of the overriding question of Icke’s The Doctor – how do we make our judgements? This is the plot’s premise: is the doctor right to refuse to let a Catholic priest visit a Catholic girl dying of a self-inflicted abortion? And the same question guides the production’s most obvious conceit, whereby the cast is gender- and colour-blind. How does our perception change, when we realise a character played by a black woman is a white man, or a black man a white Jewish man, or a young woman a young man?
Such descriptions can only be a simplification, answers Icke. He doesn’t go further, as far as I can see, and assert that these simplifications are ‘bad’. He says only that they are simplifications, and demonstrates the consequences of the resultant biases. Indeed, it would be contrary to the spirit of the play to assert such judgements. This thoughtful, sensitive balance is perhaps why I admired the play, and have thought about it, but not loved it. The play’s emotional core, the doctor’s relationship with her partner and his suffering from dementia, are delicately finished but still secondary to that question, explored with a rigour that casts the rest in shadow. But for demonstrating how considered, stretching and fascinating theatre can be, Icke and his team deserve full credit.
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