As a director and writer, Robert Icke specialises in updating the classics. But where his version of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck struck me as an impertinence, this adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi is a brilliant expansion of the original’s themes. Icke’s production also yields a performance by Juliet Stevenson that is one of the peaks of the theatrical year.
First performed in 1912, Schnitzler’s play offers a devastating portrait of Viennese antisemitism in showing a Jewish doctor attacked for refusing a Catholic priest permission to administer the last rites to a patient. Icke retains Schnitzler’s premise while subtly rewriting it. His protagonist, Ruth Wolff, is a secular Jew who runs a prestigious institute specialising in Alzheimer’s disease. But when Ruth prevents a priest seeing a 14-year-old girl dying from a self-administered abortion, the incident acquires a toxic publicity. It goes viral on social media, provokes petitions and TV debates, and jeopardises not only Ruth’s future but that of the institute and a government-bankrolled new building.
Impressively, Icke enlarges the original to take on not just religion but also race, gender and class. He even adds a creative dissonance in casting women to play male roles, black actors to play white characters and vice versa.
At the heart of the play lie two crucial issues handled with exemplary fairness. One is whether the purity of medical ethics supersedes all other considerations. The other related topic is the danger of constantly playing identity politics: as one of Ruth’s colleagues points out, it is irrelevant whether a doctor is white, Jewish, godless or a woman, and even more destructive to allow the professions to be judged by sanctimonious trolls.
All of this is debated with fierce clarity. Icke, following Schnitzler, shows his protagonist as a victim without totally exculpating her. This double vision is magnificently captured by Stevenson. She shows Ruth to be brusque, politically naive and intolerant of other people’s failings, especially when it comes to the misuse of language. But while Stevenson shows how integrity can turn into obduracy, she also beautifully portrays the human cost of making medicine one’s god. Her features look memorably pained when seen in closeup during a hostile TV encounter, and she confronts the sacrifice of her relations with her lover and a transgender teenager with an unbearable sense of loss. This consummate performance shows Ruth in all her complexity.
In fact, everything about Icke’s production feels right. Hildegard Bechtler’s design has a clinical simplicity, and the cast, although not identified by character, inhabit their roles perfectly. Paul Higgins as the impassioned priest, Naomi Wirthner as Ruth’s most implacable opponent, Pamela Nomvete as her fiercest champion and Ria Zmitrowicz as her betrayed friend all perform with great skill.
This is not the only way to approach Schnitzler’s play, as shown by a 2005 production at the Arcola in London, with a text by Samuel Adamson, that respected its Viennese setting. But what Icke has done is heighten the play’s contemporary resonances and movingly suggest that the doctor and the priest, while dramatic antagonists, have more in common than they realise.
At the Almeida, London, until 28 September.
