Deceived by the Stars

The Theatre Royal Bath is an enchanting little place. When I saw that a play called The Doctor was being performed there and that it was adapted from a work by the Viennese playwright Schnitzler and told the story of what happens when a doctor refuses to let a Catholic priest give a dying teenager the last rites, I was excited - Vienna, Catholicism, an old and pretty theatre, these are a few of my favourite things. 

I looked up the reviews of the production, which started out in London at the Almeida theatre. Without exception, it had been awarded five stars.  

Once I'd discovered this fact, I found it surprisingly easy to persuade my husband to come along. What an error. He already wasn't as keen on live theatre as I am, but his suspicion about any suggestions of theatre outings has increased tenfold following our experience of The Doctor.

It wasn't that the play was badly acted or didn't at first look good. The opening sequence was dramatic, with the cast crowding onto the stage, lining up at its edge and staring boldly out at the audience, and then picking up their costumes from the floor and putting them on, as they strode into their positions. The plot unfolded. An intriguing situation was put in place.

But then things got strange. The play, now set in a hospital in an English-speaking country in the twenty-first century, seems originally to have had anti-semitism in late nineteenth or early twentieth century Vienna as its central theme. In that historical context, anti-semitism was a very real and pervasive phenomenon - but it is no longer. These days, in Austria and Germany and in most parts of the English-speaking world, being Jewish is not something that influences whether or not you are successful professionally. 

Despite this shift in attitudes, rather than change the axis of the play, so that instead of anti-semitism it would have at its centre the two conflicts that have dominated life over these last pandemic years and that would seem especially relevant in the context of a twenty-first century hospital where a priest has been barred from plying his trade - the conflict between those who believe in "the science" and those who put other elements of existence above "the science" and the conflict between elites and the populations upon whom they impose their certainties (are these two conflicts actually one and the same?) - the play's adapter retains all the original play's arguments about anti-semitism, even though they are clearly particular to Vienna at the time Schnitzler lived. While retaining the theme of anti-semitism, the adapter then adds the wider spectrum of identity politics into the mix. Finally, presumably with the intention of challenging all claims about the importance or relevance of identity in any shape or form, the production has been blind cast for both colour and gender. Far from being five star quality, the result is a total muddle.

In the original drama, the main character was a man, but in this new adaptation she is a woman. She is also played by a woman, so that isn't too confusing. Her main opponent however, is a man, as he was in the original work, but he is played by a female person of colour. It happens that this man, played by a female person of colour, is a Catholic - and that the main character, the female, played by a female, is Jewish. 

Meanwhile, the female doctor's defender is played by an Obama-like, tall, handsome man who appears to be of partly African descent, but whose character, we eventually learn, is white and Jewish, like her. Another male doctor, a hospital board member, is played by a woman who is probably either entirely or partly of African descent. Her character at one point says, "I can claim to be African because I was born in Kenya" and it comes as a surprise when she is told in reply, "That doesn't count, given that your face is completely white." As her face isn't completely white, this is confusing, but I suppose it is racist to notice that someone who is a person of colour is having her racial origin denied, (while simultaneously purporting to be a man when she is a woman). 

A third, less senior, doctor is played by a white man who never turns out to be female but does suddenly, an hour and a quarter into proceedings, turn out to be black - you discover this when another character says to him, "You're black". The character of hospital PR woman is played by a well-built woman - or possibly by a cross-dressing man. A young doctor, played by a female whose parents may have originated from Japan, China or Korea, at some point during the play turns out to be male and white.

Most startlingly, the Catholic priest who is refused access to a dying patient and is played by a tall, thin man who speaks with an Irish accent and has Celtic colouring turns out to be black. We discover this about an hour in, when it is revealed that one of the reasons the character feels especially offended by the doctor's refusal to let him minister to her patient is his sense that he has been racially discriminated against as someone with black skin. 

This is theatre as medicine. Presumably if we as an audience notice whether a character is being played by a woman or a man, or whether their skin is black or white, we have a problem. These things don't matter, is, (I guess), the message? If you are sophisticated enough you don't see these things?  If so, are we also supposed to think that when a character complains that they are being discriminated against because they are black, we should think the complaint is nonsensical, because we have all agreed that we can't see the difference between skin colours? Aren't we somewhere in here demeaning the victims of genuine racism by pretending that a white actor is convincing as a black character who has suffered discrimination? Does this make sense? Does this work? Does this deserve five stars? 

Anyway, leaving aside these baffling aspects, the whole thing got increasingly shouty. I'm not convinced by the brilliance of Juliet Stevenson as an actor but I had to hand it to her when she was required to deliver the most banal line I think I've ever heard in theatre: "Life is complicated".

I don't know why I am surprised by the confusing casting. In December 2021 the theatre reviewer in The Times wrote excitedly about "how colour-blind casting has taken off in this country": 

What he did not explain is what makes blind casting such an unquestionably marvellous thing.