{"id":1871,"date":"2019-09-03T15:25:05","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T14:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1871"},"modified":"2019-09-03T20:54:30","modified_gmt":"2019-09-03T19:54:30","slug":"propwatch-the-kettle-in-the-doctor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2019\/09\/propwatch-the-kettle-in-the-doctor.html","title":{"rendered":"Propwatch: the kettle in The Doctor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Is a home without a kettle even a home? \u2018Oh David, such a\nhomemaker,\u2019 sighed a visitor to my spartan university room, softened only by a\nkettle and the complete Arden Shakespeare. But the kettle was hospitality and\nself-care for a scaredy-cat student; even today it amplifies (and, on grouchy\ndays, paves the way back towards) connection. A kettle is the first step\ntowards home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Doctor<\/a><\/em> \u2013 Robert Icke\u2019s coruscating new play based on Schnitzler\u2019s Professor Bernhadi <\/em>\u2013 the kettle is pretty much the only step. It\u2019s one of very few props in Hildegard Bechtler\u2019s exposing design. At the hospital where Professor Ruth Wolff is director, there are case notes and lanyards. At home, there\u2019s only the kettle. It\u2019s in view for most of the play. Only Juliet Stevenson\u2019s transfixing Wolff gets more stage time \u2013 this character of remorseless commitment almost never leaves our sight, not even for the interval.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kettles may be kitchen keystones but are also often its\nleast elegant object. Squat old whistlers, off-white plastic jugs, hi-tech\nbraggarts. They don\u2019t have to be lookers to be lowkey beloved. Wolff\u2019s kettle is\na shiny steel upright, round-based and with a truncated stump of a spout. It\nhas a dalek vibe, which figures. Wolff is controlled, unyielding, out of step\nsocially yet state of the art in her work \u2013 a dalek kettle is probably how she\nappears to her colleagues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The kettle stays put for the hospital scenes \u2013 after all, a workplace without a kettle is almost unheard of. It\u2019s the anchor<\/a> of bonding and shunning, of acts of kindness and microaggression. No one actually uses it during The Doctor<\/em>\u2019s bruising, fraught meetings \u2013 though if they did, you can bet it would be the conduit for pass-agg beveraging, with tea-making duties foisted on the most junior member of the medical team (a permanently disgruntled Kirsty Rider). Maybe if everyone stopped grandstanding and shared a cuppa they could avoid the sexism and anti-semitism, the conniving and betrayal that lead to Wolff\u2019s downfall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although her trajectory mirrors that of Schnitzler\u2019s protagonist\nfrom 1912 \u2013 another Jewish doctor who finds that anti-semitism is alive and\nsnarling \u2013 Wolff falls foul of a very contemporary culture war. When she\nrefuses a Catholic priest permission to visit a dying patient (victim of a\nself-administered termination), he films and shares the encounter. One online\npetition later, Wolff has become a pariah \u2013 shamed as godless, racist or Jewish\ndepending on who does the shaming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Icke\u2019s play (which he directs, unsparingly, to the queasy\nbeat of Hannah Ledwidge\u2019s percussion) comes at a precisely fraught cultural\nmoment. Many of us feel caught between the identities the world sees in us and\nthose we see in ourselves. Icke\u2019s production casts across gender and ethnicity,\nas productions increasingly do \u2013 but doesn\u2019t signal the casting until quite far\ninto the play. A doctor\u2019s white coat covers all identities, so we\u2019re jolted\nwhen a female actor (Naomi Wirthner) is revealed as Wolff\u2019s bullish male antagonist,\na black actor (Oliver Alvin-Wilson) announces himself as Jewish, or a white\nactor (Paul Higgins) as the black priest. By the time we learn their \u2018official\u2019\nidentities, we\u2019ve already accumulated assumptions based on what we\u2019ve seen. It\u2019s\nwrongfooting (even if Icke can\u2019t control audience titters at each reversal, and\nwhich make the choices seem trivial). Brilliantly, we never know if Charley,\nWolff\u2019s partner, played by Joy Richardson, is male or female \u2013 which in turns\nlets Wolff retain the privacy of her private life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the casting makes clear, the blessed state of being identity-free is a lost luxury, an indulgence for our private moments. Wolff \u2013 a pioneering female researcher, a wholly secular Jew \u2013 doesn\u2019t especially consider herself either Jewish or a woman in her working context, but especially when embroiled in controversy, she doesn\u2019t have the luxury of label-free living. Other people assess her identity, judge her through its lens. As Thomas Ostermeier<\/a> (whose production of the Schnitzler play is in rep at the Schaub\u00fchne in Berlin) defines the central question, \u2018I put it in one sentence: how can you be a humanistic person and not a political one in political times?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stevenson herself is cast against type. Her soft-brushed patrician tones might not be everybody\u2019s first pick for a Jewish heroine, and the role denies the actor\u2019s impulsive, destabalising warmth. She has to stay chilly, intellectually \u2018crystal clear\u2019 even if politically bamboozled, her muscles held in a ramrod state of tension. In one late, brief sequence she hurtles around the stage and the furiously unleashed movement comes as momentary relief, a hot breath on a chilly day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does Wolff ever feel at home? Possibly not, or not often.\nWe know that she lost at least one grandparent to the holocaust; maybe her\nfamily came over in the 1930s rather than the turn of the century, so it would\nhardly be surprising if her parents shared the packed-suitcase syndrome of so\nmany Jewish families. The kettle, Wolff tells us, was a constant in her\nupbringing \u2013 \u2018maybe a biscuit if you’d been good\u2019 \u2013 and tended as an icon of\nthe home. As long as the kettle was warm, you were safe. She keeps it on the\nboil even now, whether or not she fancies a tea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Late in the play, Wolff recounts a moment when she realised the kettle had gone cold, an immediate intimation of disaster. It\u2019s devastating. It\u2019s perhaps not surprising that, over the past year or two, I\u2019ve written fairly frequently about props that carry ideas of home \u2013 whether these ideas settle around food<\/a>, furnishings<\/a> or duck-based d\u00e9cor<\/a>. Home feels far less stable an idea that once it did, and anxieties around migration and nation put acute pressure on the domestic. A cold wind blows; our nests shake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All photos by Manuel Harlan<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is a home without a kettle even a home? \u2018Oh David, such a homemaker,\u2019 sighed a visitor to my spartan university room, softened only by a kettle and the complete Arden Shakespeare. But the kettle was hospitality and self-care for a scaredy-cat student; even today it amplifies (and, on grouchy days, paves the way back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[194,322,321,175,34],"class_list":{"0":"post-1871","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-almeida-theatre","9":"tag-props","10":"tag-propwatch","11":"tag-robert-icke","12":"tag-theatre","13":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1871"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1882,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1871\/revisions\/1882"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}