I
t’s a fond farewell to Robert Icke.
The brightest directing talent
British theatre has produced in
a generation – and the youngest
ever winner of the Olivier Award
for Best Director to boot – is leaving
his permanent post on these shores
for pastures new, and possibly more
experimental, in Europe. His final
huzzah at the Almeida, the venue that
has nurtured Icke and given rise to
his phenomenal work on Oresteia and
Mary Stuart, to name but two, serves
as a razor-sharp reminder of what is
about to be lost.
For starters, Icke must once more
be ruing the fact that theatre doesn’t
follow film’s lead and include a Best
Adapted Play category in its award
ceremonies as, in addition to his
directorial nous he is equally adept
at intellectually dazzling new spins
on classic texts. He freely, skilfully
and rigorously transposes Arthur
Schnitzler’s 1912 Viennese drama
Professor Bernhardi to contemporary
England, gently nudging the debate
along from its starting point of medical
ethics to cover personal morality
and, finally, the hot topic of identity
politics. The impassioned howl he
raises against the reductive nature of
the latter could surely be heard on the
continent.
Schnitzler’s original afforded almost
no airtime to women, a fact that Icke
corrects at a stroke by turning the
male professor into Dr Ruth Woolf
(Juliet Stevenson). She is the founding
director of the prestigious Elizabeth
Institute, a stern professional with
an attitude of “trademark disdain”.
The catalyst for the drama is when
a 14-year-old, dying of sepsis after
a botched at-home abortion, comes
into the care of Dr Wolff, who refusesadmittance to a priest (Paul Higgins)
when he wishes to administer the
last rites. Dr Wolff asserts firmly that
her patient’s religious convictions are
uncertain and the girl must be left to
die in peace.
Arguments and recriminations
about religion – Dr Wolff ’s parents
were Jewish – are the first to bubble
up, followed swiftly by race, gender
and education, as various interested
parties engage in a ferocious battle,
stoked by social media, to stake out
the greatest claim of victimhood. In
a script note, Icke states that “each
actor’s identity should be directly
dissonant with their character’s in
at least one way”, and he embarks
upon a thrilling series of games
of theatricality and rug-pulling in
which nothing is quite what – or who- it seems. Actresses, for example,
suddenly assert their character’s
masculinity, whereas a white actor
announces “I’m a black man”.
We are, the play says from its slickly
impersonal set on a slow revolve,
far more complex than a series of
simplistic labels. This assertion is
underscored by Dr Wolff ’s home
life, which comprises two shadowy
figures whose truths are revealed
only late on.
Stevenson has shone for Icke in two
of his previous Almeida productions
(Hamlet and Mary Stuart) and does so
again here, in a towering performance
that will surely win awards. Stevenson
walks the finest of tightropes,
brilliantly ensuring that while we
sympathise with Dr Wolff ’s impossible
predicament, we never warm to her.
Her uncompromising mien starts to
crumble and she becomes a rumpled,
hounded figure whose certainties are
brutally chipped away by detractors
on all sides whose personal agendas
hold no regard for medical best
practice. There’s strong support too
from that intriguingly shape-shifting
actress Ria Zmitrowicz as a gauche,
truth-telling teenager.
Icke’s work is less flashy and more
incisive than some of his previous
offerings and the result is a piece of
theatre of the highest calibre. It is
greatly to be hoped that he does not
stay away too long.How The Matrix stopped cinema in its tracks
As a new sequel is
announced, Tim
Robey looks at the
classic film’s legacy,
from bullet-dodging
to trench coats
to bitter self-knowledge and the truth.
In its action scenes, The Matrix
made play with the violation of space
and time – stopping bullets mid-flight
and allowing the viewer’s perspective
to shift and undulate as Neo ducks
out of their way. This technique,
quickly dubbed “Bullet Time”, became
the trademark “wow” effect of this
burgeoning franchise, and was
trademarked under that name when
Warner Bros released their video game
The Matrix Online in 2005.
The effects designer John
Gaeta achieved it by installing 120
cameras on set to take shots in quick
succession, picking up where the
early photography pioneer Eadweard
Muybridge left off when he captured a
galloping horse with serial exposures
in 1878.
Gaeta’s iteration of this was soon
being aped everywhere – just look at
all the bullet-dodging that the X-Men
superhero Quicksilver has done in his
past few outings.
Parodied as early as Shrek (2001),
it has since leapt off cinema screens
into big-budget TV (Sherlock
used it in 2014), red-carpet Oscars
coverage, and even Broadway: whatJuliet Stevenson shines in a superb
farewell from a great British director
TheatreThe Doctor
Almeida, London N1★★★★★
By Fiona MountfordTowering performance: Juliet Stevenson as Dr Woolf, left, with Joy Richardson as CharlieT
wo massive, effects-
laden science fiction
blockbusters opened
wide in the summer
of 1999. To everyone’s
shock, the one that was
accused of destroying childhoods was
by George Lucas. Star Wars: Episode
1 – The Phantom Menace was widely
viewed as a crushing disappointment,
despite all the hype attending the first
film in its now beloved franchise.
The one that changed cinema, for
better or worse, was its rival: a fiercely
cool, riskily philosophical $63 million
production from Warner Brothers,
which bet the house on everyone
wanting to watch Keanu Reeves doing
mid-air kung fu in a black leather
trench coat and shades.
It was a bet well-placed, despite the
fact that Lana and Lilly Wachowski
(born Larry and Andy), the film’s
sibling masterminds, had only one
feature to their names before it, 1996’s
lesbian neo-noir Bound.
Matrix fever swept the world in
1999, and it became the rare number
one hit in America which dipped
to two in its second week, before
resurging to top the charts again in
its third. It would take nearly half
a billion dollars worldwide, spawn
two exponentially more expensive
sequels – over which a polite veil
shall be drawn – and now a third, just
announced with Reeves, Carrie-Anne
Moss and Lana Wachowski on board.
The Matrix made a huge dent in
the popular consciousness, whether
you liked it or not. Cyber-hacker
chic suddenly seemed like a credible
wardrobe choice, and, in adverts
for anything vaguely hi-tech, you
couldn’t move for all that green code
tumbling down the screen from the
opening sequence – “digital rain”, they
called it. Not only did the film import
Eastern martial arts into big-budget
Hollywood cinema more successfully
than Hong Kong’s premier export
John Woo had yet managed, but it
came with more than a side serving of
Buddhist-inflected philosophy, too.
What dazzled fans and spawned a
million dissertations was not just the
WARNER BROS; ALAMYMANUEL HARLANfilm’s rabidly emulated slow motion
shoot-outs, but its play of ideas.
Reeves’s Neo, a computer hacker,
finds out that our perceived world is
all an elaborate illusion – a simulation
being fed into our brains by machines.
The idea of questioning what ourUntil Sept 28. Tickets: 020 7359 4404;
almeida.co.ukis that human bullet sailing towards
Alexander Hamilton on stage if not a
choreographed riff on the exact same
idea?
The Matrix also predates the
Marvel Cinematic Universe in its
own proliferation across space, time
and various home-entertainment
platforms. There weren’t just the
video games – three to date – but a
Japanese animation anthology, The
Animatrix, which created a further
network of storytelling links, building
an unstoppable mythos for fan sites
to explore.
Meanwhile, the industrial
importance of this film’s wild success
was especially significant because of
the recent arrival of DVD, a relatively
new-on-the-block technology that
could hardly have served as a more
tempting inducement for the Matrix
faithful. While the Wachowskis
weren’t quite able to match the clout
of Star Wars in cinemas, which –
despite its many failings – topped the
theatrical box office that year, their
film was an instant must-own on the
shiny home format, and smashed
all records when it was released in
September 1999, obliterating sales
of previous champs Titanic and
Armageddon.
Packed with special features
exploring every nook and cranny of
production, not only did The Matrix
become the disc pretty much everyone
was guaranteed to own, people
actually bought DVD players just to be
able to watch it on them.
In retrospect, just as there’s
something quaint about our
conviction that DVDs were ever cool
objects – rather than soon-obsolete
physical media with a resolution
contemptible in the 4K era – the
original hype-bubble of The Matrix is
something more fondly remembered
with nostalgia now than awe.
The sequels did it some damage,
as did embarrassing cash-in attempts
such as Equilibrium and Ecks vs Sever
(both 2002). While no one would call
the film more relevant now than ever,
especially not to the Marvel-weaned
generation it has since passed by, it’s
hard to deny that The Matrix itself was
a huge moment when it happened. The
long, swooping shadow of those trench
coats is inescapable, 20 years on.Faster than a
speeding bullet:
Keanu Reeves as
Neo, Carrie-Anne
Moss as Trinity, far
left, and Laurence
Fishburne, below,
as MorpheusThe Matrix
made a huge
dent in
popularculture:
cyber-hacker
chic wassuddenly a
crediblewardrobe
choiceArts
given reality looks like goes back to
Descartes, but Neo, in this film, is
given the rare privilege of ducking
behind the curtain.
He’s offered the choice of a red or
blue pill by the Buddha-like Morpheus
(Laurence Fishburne), and in choosing
the red, he renounces the cushioned,
fake surface world and sees reality for
what it truly is below – a successor to
Alice delving down the rabbit hole.
This pill meme alone, drawing on
influences as various as Lewis Carroll,
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and the
anime film Ghost in the Shell (1995),
has become culturally unforgettable,
even to the point where the men’s
rights movement use it as a central
tenet of their thinking – the blue pill,
to them, representing a state of blissful
ignorance, while the red one is a portal
Culture
newsletter
For the latest
reviews, direct to
your inbox, sign
up for our Culture
newsletter
telegraph.co.uk/
culturenewsletter22 ***^ Thursday 22 August 2019 The Daily Telegraph
RELEASED BY "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws