Duke of York’s Theatre, London
Robert Icke’s combative 2019 play about medical ethics, identity politics and antisemitism returns to the West End to divide and challenge audiences
The return of Robert Icke’s play about medical ethics, identity politics and antisemitism brings all the same contentions as its original run. It is often static in its action, abrasive in its tone and revels in its flagrant theatricality. Yet the effects are slowly, searingly electric and you are unlikely to see anything in the West End that comes with the same amounts of tension, combative intellectual complexity and sheer bare-toothed drama as Icke’s reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 Viennese “comedy”, Professor Bernhardi.
Again directed by Icke, this production is a very close replica of the original at the Almeida theatre. Its plot is relatively straightforward: Ruth Wolff, the Jewish director of a leading medical institute, refuses entry to a Catholic priest to read the last rites to a 14-year-old patient who is dying of a botched, self-administered abortion. That refusal sparks online protests and government intervention outside the medical centre, and an aggressive jostling for power within it, while rank antisemitic scapegoating of the doctor ranges across the board.
