IIn an ideal world, this criticism would be very short: a neatly built piece, today’s characters with understandable conflicts, a minimalist, abstract stage, properly played.
But by the 35-year-old writer and director Robert Icke its successful production „The Doctor“ from the London Almeida Theater an der Wiener Burg reproduced – in Christina Schlögl’s generally somewhat discouraged German translation – it creates a need for discussion.
From the slippery Anglo-American stage reality he brought the one thing with him into the German directorial theater cosmos, which is quite normal there, but here still radical, risky and somehow strange – “color-blind” occupation, i.e. not according to optical criteria.
This may also be considered a special risk because Icke, one of the many young men whom England celebrates as the savior of the theater, chose a sacred cow for the middle-class Viennese theater audience for his title: Arthur Schnitzler.
In his five-act act “Professor Bernhardi”, the eponymous Jewish doctor feels the consequences of his decision to refuse a priest access to the room of a dying girl. The media play the matter up, Bernhardi loses his position and doctorate in the course of numerous heated and escalating debates.
Shitstorms already existed in the Belle Époque around 1900. And now imagine the whole thing with the Internet.
The priest is black. And white
Professor Bernhardi became “The Doctor”, Professor Ruth Wolff, played by at the castle Sophie von Kessel. Your starting point corresponds to that in the original, with the delicate tightening in times of identity-political issues that the father, with whom Wolff clashed, is black.
She fights vehemently once morest the fact that this might play a role, because she does not believe in labels – her private caregivers are non-binary and trans, even if the German translation fails to convey this clearly – and we are right in the middle of the most beautiful and most hair-raising discussions of our time.
The only difference is that the basis for this can only be found in the dialogues. The priest is the very white castle actor Philipp Hauss.
In the vortex of the shitstorm: Sophie von Kessel as Ruth Wolff in “Die Ärztin”
Those: Marcella Ruiz Cruz
Beyond that, the audience has to do a tremendous brain work to understand that Bardo Bohlefeld In a chic, light-colored suit, a female press officer plays that Ruth Wolff is significantly older than her actress or that Stacyan Jackson as the health minister in association with her friend Ruth sees a problem in the fact that “we are both white”.
The Burgtheater, which under Martin Kušej already tries more to ensure diversity in the ensemble than the previous directorates, has also hired guests with non-white skin and / or names that are not German for this production: Ernest Allan Hausmann and Zeynep Buyraç, Melanie Sidhu and Sandra Selimović – only to let them play mostly white people.
It is remarkable how difficult this abstraction is for us in a medium that has never placed great emphasis on the perfect illusion. It would be good if this type of occupation caught on and then was no longer an issue.
Here it serves primarily as a conceptual trick that raises what is negotiated in the play to the meta level – and not least in reality, think of the tumult over Amanda Gorman translations or the authenticity promises made by Amazon. It cannot be accepted that at some point it is said: “Jewish doctors for Jewish patients and fat doctors for fat patients”, one of the colleagues exclaims, or: “Should you really do this operation if you have not experienced it yourself?”
Apart from this pointed comment, Icke’s evening is very English and thus far from any radicality “well made“. On the stage – the equipment from Hildegard Bechtler and Natasha Chivers was also taken over from London – a long table with benches turns slowly within a semicircle with symmetrically arranged doors.
Above this, hidden behind clinically glowing operating lights for many in the hall, is the excellent percussionist Teresa Müllner (alternating with Maria Petrova) and gives almost the entire performance energy with driving sounds.
Individual players have little opportunity to stand out. Together they act as an ensemble of arguing people who “simply say” things and do it credibly.
Much is yelled at each other, interrupted even more often: The debates, which this piece of ideas mainly consists of, are one-to-one, like on television or at the regulars’ table. And how with Schnitzlers „Bernhardi“except that it was mostly old white men.
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