Juliet Stevenson - "It reminds me of a time before we sent death threats on Twitter"

Virgin Radio

9 Nov 2022, 19:03

If you go to the theatre once this month, make sure it's to see this clever and provocative play.

Lighting up the West End of London right now is The Doctor, a reimagined version of Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi play. BAFTA winning Juliet Stevenson plays the lead.

Professor Bernhardi was first performed in 1912, but The Doctor is very much a play for our times.

"I play Dr. Ruth Wolf," says Juliet, "and I'm researching Alzheimer's. But one day I go into the A&E department and see a 14 year old girl who is dying of self administered abortion. The girl is Catholic. I can't save her life, but my character wants at least to give her a happy and peaceful death where the kid doesn't know she's dying. Then a priest arrives to give the child the last rites because her parents are abroad and have said to him, 'Please go and deliver the last rites to our darling daughter...'

"My character won't let him in because she doesn't want the girl to know she's dying. The priest insists, I refuse, he gets angry and I strike him in some way. It's ambiguous. So he leaves the hospital and the girl dies without having had the last rites. The doctor's Jewish, the priest is black, the girl is Catholic, and when the story goes viral, there are all sorts of competing opinions and interests..."

The play, directed by the venerated Robert Icke, is a production that makes perfect sense in 2022 - mainly because it doesn't. It explores themes of cancel culture, 'wokeness', identity politics and the like. It has a black actor playing a white character, a trans character playing a cis one...

There'll be plenty to discuss in the pub afterwards!

"What I love about the play is that it's very anti the culture," says Juliet. "It's not saying 'this is the point of view that you have to share'. It's like a prism that keeps turning. You see a different aspects of the story, different points of view. And the point is that everybody's point of view is valid and heard and shared, and people really can disagree."

She continues, "But you can disagree in the safe space of a dark theatre where nobody's gonna get screamed at or trolled. It's safe to discuss these things there. It's probably the way that it used to be before we started sending each other Twitter messages saying that we want to kill each other..."

Tickets for The Doctor are available to buy here.

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