The Doctor is an acclaimed drama from the pen of writer-director Robert Icke. We’re in a hospital run by a famous medic, Dr Ruth, whom the Cockney characters call ‘Dr Roof’. Two major problems beset Dr Roof who has to raise funds for a new private wing while grappling with her partner’s early-onset dementia. A Catholic priest barges in and demands to visit a dying patient. Dr Roof refuses. Then she punches him in the face to prove who’s boss. Her ill-advised left hook plunges the hospital into crisis, and the senior staff gather in the boardroom to sort out the mess created by Dr Roof’s violent temper. All the doctors wear white coats, like pantomime boffins, which seems an unlikely costume nowadays. And it’s hard to tell if this is a real or a fictional clinic. It doesn’t look like a TV hospital because the medics aren’t attractive enough, and it doesn’t look like a genuine hospital because the medics aren’t fat enough.
There’s another impediment to the play’s intelligibility: most of the characters have an alter ego. Dr Brian, for example, is a black female who identifies as a white male. Dr Roger suffers from the same delusion. A woman called Sami, once a man, dresses and talks like a teenage girl. An Asian MP played by Preeya Kalidas poses as an Anglo-Saxon female called Jemima. And an actor with a Jewish name, Daniel Rabin, plays a character called Dr Murphy who may be Irish and a woman. Or a giraffe perhaps. This show isn’t afraid of springing surprises. Incidentally, the priest thumped by Dr Roof asserts that he’s black although a white actor takes the role. And when we move to Dr Roof’s home we meet her lover, Charlie, who appears to be an Afro-Caribbean lesbian (although she may turn out to be a non-binary Egyptian scaffolder called Dennis).
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