Out of the Margins

"Doctors - are witches in white": a thought Robert Icke approves in the margins. 

Listed as one of Evening Standard's "50 best plays of the 21st century", The Doctor is a reimagining of Arthur Schnitzler's 1912 Professor Bernhardi, telling the updated story of Professor Ruth Wolff, the Founding Director of the Elizabeth Institute, who refuses to let a Catholic priest into the operating room where a girl is dying from a botched self-administered abortion. 

Robert Icke is the writer and director of The Doctor making this a particularly special annotated edition which gives us scene-by-scene insights into everything from word choices to ethics arguments in rehearsals. The playwright draws our attention to the many textual layers of the play - the wordplay around ‘which’ and ‘witch’, the foreshadowing of Ruth’s repeated phase ‘crystal clear’, the veiled language of anti-semitism in Emily’s father’s key speech, the musical scene transitions which pivot on one word. He also draws our attention to the formal layers of the play: the moments where a line asks us to question whether we hear it differently when spoken by certain actors, how the audience uncomfortably responds with laughter to certain prejudices, and the insights happening for the characters in silent beats on the page. 

Robert Icke highlights cuts, changes in previews, bait-and-switch tactics with introducing characters and lines he is still working to perfect. He gives us access to the choices he made both on the page and stage, always deepening the core themes at work in the play, and the questions raised of its audience. For example, in the inciting scene where Ruth refuses a priest's entry into a dying girl’s room to deliver the last rites, we are told how he conferred with a medical ethicist to complicate as far as possible who is in the ‘right’.