Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

I do wish that Robert Icke the director had trusted Robert Icke the writer a bit more.

Icke the writer has composed a script about a doctor named Ruth Wolff who strides through her life utterly certain of her ethical imperatives at every turn. Well, whenever you introduce a character so full of certitude, you know the character is being set up to be undermined by the playwright. And undermine Icke does. Wolff follows medical ethics to the letter when she refuses to allow a priest to deliver last rites to a 14-year-old girl dying from a botched abortion because the girl had not indicated a preference regarding religious observance on her official sheet. Wolff feels she is acting in accordance with her patient’s wishes. The priest believes that by denying her last rites her soul will suffer eternal agony.

Wolff’s choice blows up into a scandal that threatens her hospital’s funding and excites a civil war among the staff, which results in her being pushed out of the job she loves (and is expert at) and makes her the target of public abuse on social media. (I understand that this is inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s play Professor Bernhardi, but I’m not familiar with the original and can’t comment on what Icke has changed, though I’m fairly sure the original didn’t include television or the internet.) Finally, at the end, there is a potent scene between Wolff and the priest in which they both recognize they were locked into their respective roles and doomed to play out the confrontation that has engulfed them.

As the trajectory of the play becomes obvious rather quickly, I felt the two-act structure and two hour and forty-five minute running time was excessive. I think little would have been lost to prune some extraneous characters and play the action in one act. But much of the writing is surgically precise in a Shavian way, Icke giving all sides speeches making strong cases for their views. And the cast, led by a fierce Juliet Stevenson, serves the text with specificity and energy, even though, because of games director Icke plays by casting many of the parts without regard to the race or gender of the characters, it takes the audience a while to sort out who is whom (and what).

But Icke was not content to let what he wrote makes its own case as enacted by his strong ensemble. In his capacity as director, in order to impress the urgency of the material onto the audience, he has placed a drummer on a high platform to punctuate the scenes and cued lights to flare as if to add italics. Other scenes are played with a thrumming soundtrack underneath. This strikes me as overkill. When actors are caught evaluating their own characters, we call it indicating. This is not a good thing. Directors, too, can succumb to indicating. I think Icke is doing just that with this production.

I do recommend seeing The Doctor (currently playing at the Armory on Park Avenue). We rarely get a chance to see Juliet Stevenson live, and she does champion work here. And maybe you won’t be as bothered as I was by the encrustation of directorial gilding.