Review Roundup: World Premiere Play THE DOCTOR Opens At Park Avenue Armory

Following his acclaimed repertory productions of Hamlet and Oresteia in summer 2022, director and playwright Robert Icke returns to the Park Avenue Armory for the North American premiere of The Doctor, his original, contemporary play which was awarded Best Director (2019 Evening Standard Theatre Awards) and Best Actress (2019 Critic's Circle Theatre Awards) when it premiered at the Almeida Theater, and unanimous acclaim for its recent West End transfer. Read the reviews!

Leading the cast and reprising her critically acclaimed role is British actress and frequent Icke collaborator Juliet Stevenson, performing on the New York stage for the first time in 20 years. A loose adaption of Arthur Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, The Doctor follows the story of Ruth Wolff, a founding doctor at a leading medical facility, who prohibits a priest from visiting a young patient on her deathbed. Featuring intentionally subversive casting that upends identity-based assumptions, as well as an on-stage drummer amplifying the pressure Ruth faces, The Doctor lays bare social schisms and the complicated relationships between medicine and religion, race and gender, and public sentiment and private funding.

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Jesse Green, The New York Times: Attacking identity from every direction, Icke moves bravely into the danger zone of heightened sensitivity and calls for cancellation. Perhaps he goes too far in stacking the deck: Though some of Wolff’s antagonists, especially the girl’s yahoo of a father, make clearly antisemitic remarks, Wolff herself is almost worse. Not merely complacently sure of herself, like Bernhardi, she is, in Stevenson’s unflinching performance, a completely unsympathetic blowhard. However well done, the success of that interpretation backfires: As she howls, insults and snaps her fingers at underlings so relentlessly you begin to wonder whether her enemies are right, even if for the wrong reason.

Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast: It is thanks to Stevenson—the many emotions that cross her face, her imperious fury, her scornful curl of a lip, her chorus of nervous energies—that the production is so compelling. She is a magnetic, bold, and brilliant performer. But around her, the play feels a tired and claustrophobic rhetorical parlor game, echoing the bafflement we see on Stevenson’s face. What is she doing here, what has she done, she wonders over and over again. The play truly doesn’t seem to know, both about its lead character and itself.

Elysa Gardner, New York Stage Review: “I don’t go in for groups,” Ruth sniffs at one point, to which one panelist, who introduces herself as “a researcher and the chair of a nationally recognized campaign group for the understanding of unconscious bias,” responds, “Society groups us—that’s the thing it does.” The researcher is something of a modern cliché; her manner and much of what she says are deliberately irritating. But here, at least, she’s not wrong. In recognizing the complexity of our moment in history and seizing on its dramatic potential, The Doctor delivers blazing and deeply therapeutic entertainment.

Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: More problematically, he’s cast actors who don’t conform to the sex or race of the characters they’re playing, such as the priest, who’s played by a white actor but revealed to be Black much later on only via a strategically placed line of dialogue. Women play men, a character is revealed to be transgender, and so on. We get the idea, that we’re plagued by unconscious biases regarding gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. (there’s even an essay about it in the program, in case you didn’t get the message), but the device is heavy-handed and overly literal despite the fine efforts of the terrific ensemble. The text, too, becomes overly didactic, especially in a scene in the second act in which Wolff attempts to defend her actions on some sort of television program featuring a panel of self-described experts who lecture her about racism, post-colonialism, gender bias, and the meaning of wokeness. The stilted dialogue lays out the play’s themes so baldly it’s as if we’re watching a dramatized graduate thesis. But those flaws don’t matter in the face of Stevenson’s towering performance. 

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