30
Critics
A suitable
case for
treatment
Robert Icke’s time as associate
director at the Almeida has been
explosive. He leaves, after six years ,
still in his early 30s , having opened
up and dusted off, among others,
1984 , Hamlet and Mary Stuart. His
fi nal production is among the most
remarkable for its twisting, needling
argument, its radiant intimacy and
a blazing central performance from
Juliet Stevenson.
The Doctor has been “very
freely” adapted by Icke from Arthur
Schnitzler’s play Professor Bernhardi,
fi rst staged in Berlin in 1912. The
central trigger of the action is the
same: a doctor, wanting to protect a
young woman from the knowledge
that she is dying, refuses to allow
a Catholic priest to administer the
last rites. The doctor is Jewish and
after the girl’s death is enveloped
in a storm of anti semitic protest;
the play was originally banned in
Vienna, where it is set.
Icke makes the storm into a
blizzard, in which selfhood is
fractured, dispelled, unknowable.
His doctor is white and a woman
and an atheist, the head of a medical
lighting. The huge gilt lettering on
a glossy, sky-blue screen: this is
POPULAR. Above all, the notion of
being buttonholed by another white,
public-school boy who presses his
classical learning on us and has a
strong facetious streak. Eheu!
And yet. This trilogy of
monologues based on Fry’s books
(two published, one yet to appear),
and directed by Tim Carroll , has
huge brio. The feat of memory –institution where some feel the
white and the female and the non-
religious are privileged. The priest
is, it turns out, black. “Turns out”,
because in a brilliantly bewildering
manoeuvre, Icke cross-casts black
and white actors, women and
men, so that we know what they
“are” only when they tell us. Much
as they declare their profession
by a uniform: characters are seen
becoming a priest and doctor by
putting on dog collar and white coat.
This jolt to assumptions is needed- even when it means too much is
going on. The production, which
teases us into thinking we are seeing
things from all angles, with the
stage revolving minutely through
the evening, is more tendentious
than it fi rst appears. I doubt whether
many in the Almeida audience will
be lining up behind characters other
than the doctor.
Stevenson brings all her
perplexed intensity to the role.
Limbs neat and rigid, she moves like
a soldier on parade. She quenches
a subordinate with a fl ick of her
eyes. Yet under interrogation her
face – observed in closeup on a
video screen – is seen at war with
itself, eyes and mouth puckering in
contradiction and pain. Alongside
her, Ria Zmitrowicz magnetises as
an adolescent swimming up from
the depths of diffi culty.
The Doctor is more than a debate,
as much personal as public. Above
the stage Hannah Ledwidge
sits drumming, sending out a
pulse between scenes. Hildegard
Bechtler’s design – pale wood and
metal in clean curves – looks clear-
cut but is drizzled with shadow by
Natasha Chivers’s subtle lighting.
Everything steers towards the
confl icts of a doctor whose favoured
expression is “crystal clear”. Icke is a
really complete director.
Many things put me off Mythos ,
Stephen Fry’s retelling of Greek
myths. The leather armchair that
might have been lifted from under
the bum of a dozing gent in the
London Library. The default violet
‘Twisting, needling argument’: Ria
Zmitrowicz and Juliet Stevenson in The
Doctor. Photograph by Manuel HarlanBELOW
‘Vivacious nuggets’:
Stephen Fry’s Mythos
at the Festival
theatre, Edinburgh.
Photograph
by David Cooperthere is no standard running time
as the number of ad libs vary, but
together they run at more than eight
hours – starts with the beginning
of the gods and men: “a huge
cosmic yawn”, which Fry points
out eventually gave us biscuits, art
and politicians. “Heroes” moves
through men wrestling with
monsters (Heracles trudges off “like
a commuter” to get rid of them) and
their complicated mating with gods,
their own family members and the
occasional beast. “Men” gives us the
Trojan war: wandering and coming
home. Fry puts it all together at the
end by pronouncing it a coming-of-
age story: a growth of independence
of men from gods, a subsuming
of their attributes into mental and
emotional states.
That is as close as he gets to
analysis, though Freud’s castration
anxiety gets a nod (“bless him”)
and the Greeks a pat on the back
for being sexually adventurous.
The trilogy is a string of vivacious
nuggets. Individual stories are
partly updated – “Olympus has got
talent” – and partly treated as cosyRobert Icke concludes
his dazzling run at the
Almeida with a pointedreworking of Schnitzler’s
medical ethics drama.
Plus, Stephen Fry’s one-
man Greek mythsTheatre
The Doctor
Almeida, London N1;
until 28 Sept
Mythos: A Trilogy: Gods,
Heroes, Men
Festival theatre, Edinburgh
Susannah
Clapp