Juliet Stevenson: ‘You can take all your craziness and use it to tell other people’s stories’

“In a way, I’ve rediscovered what theatre is with this play,” says actor Juliet Stevenson. “It is one of the few safe places at the moment where views can be discussed and nobody comes to any harm. You leave the theatre, it’s all been aired and nobody’s been hurt.”

We are sitting by the bay window of the royal circle bar in Brighton’s Theatre Royal. It’s late Friday afternoon at the end of a turbulent 24 hours in British history: the Queen’s face gazes down from sombre black billboards across the seaside town.

In a few hours, this elegant room will hum with audience chatter. But for now, it’s just us. A seagull patrols the balcony outside, buffeted by the sea breeze, and we can hear the faint cries of a street entertainer on the pavement below. This is Brighton, after all.

The play in question is The Doctor, Robert Icke’s scintillating version of a 1912 drama by Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler. In the original, a principled Jewish clinician refuses to let a priest read the last rites to a dying girl, provoking a public outcry. Icke’s adaptation turns it into a blistering play for today, pitching the story into the 21st century and the world of instant online judgment, culture wars and trial by Twitter.

Opening in 2019 at London’s Almeida, The Doctor won awards, received glowing reviews and was set for a West End run. But then came our own medical emergency and, with it, lockdown. Now the show is finally making that transfer, after a brief tour to Brighton, Bath and Richmond.

The intervening two years have only made it more relevant, says Stevenson: “It feels even more dangerous out there now. It’s as though hating has become a hobby.”

In Icke’s hands, the piece plays like a moral thriller. Science clashes with religion, principle with pragmatism, understanding with prejudice. You watch aghast as Ruth, the doctor, is sucked deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of public opinion. Ruth’s reasoning — that she’s protecting her patient’s peace of mind — is torn apart, along with her career.

Icke’s reworking continually shifts your perspective, an ingenious theatrical coup forcing you to reassess your responses. It also adds a painful personal story that gradually casts light on Ruth’s behaviour. You see both her integrity and her intransigence. One of Stevenson’s skills is to reveal things to us about Ruth that the character doesn’t know about herself.

“She’s not a moral heroine, she’s stubborn, she’s wilful and she doesn’t have a lot of self-knowledge,” she says. “But she’s my girl. She’s my character. You have to love your character because you have to understand them. I have this image of her in a school playground, being picked on for being clever, for not being cool . . . Because once you understand a character’s childhood, really the play will take care of itself.”

Theatre is always more crucial in dark times as a place where we can come together

For all the heated debate, at the core of the play is an aching sense of loss. That too has acquired more weight over the past two years. Stevenson reflects that barely a household across the country has been left untouched by illness or loss since 2020.

Her own family has suffered enormous grief. Her stepson, the film-maker Tomo Brody, died in November 2020 aged 37, and she lost her mother this year. She says she found some solace in painting, which she had taken up during lockdown: “It became an outlet for a lot of things.” But given the candour with which the play deals with death, rehearsals for the show were initially tough.

“The first week of rehearsal I felt incredibly shaky,” she says. “I felt really skinless in that rehearsal room. I’m OK now because now, I’m Ruth — I can filter it through her. And that’s what acting is. You can take all your craziness, all your grief and all your joy out there and you can use it to tell other people’s stories. So, in a way, your personal experience of grief or joy becomes a universal one.

“I think that’s why I can just about manage to say [theatre] is an important thing to do,” she adds. “For a long period I was in doubt about that. In my forties I thought, ‘What am I doing here? The world is getting bad — what am I doing, dressing up and pretending to be other people?’ But, actually, the worse society gets, the more important the live arts become . . . Theatre is always more crucial in dark times as a place where we can come together.”

In conversation, Stevenson is a warm and open individual. It’s partly that emotional intelligence and willingness to strip off a layer of skin on stage that makes her such a moving actor. Several of her recent roles have portrayed women whose tough exterior conceals a wealth of strife: Elizabeth I in Mary Stuart, Dorothy in the ITV crime drama The Long Call, a heartbreaking Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

There’s also a streak of jeopardy running through her work. “I love risk,” she says. “I’m terrified of becoming boring.” In Wings, she swooped around on a trapeze; in Mary Stuart, she and Lia Williams flipped a coin each night to decide who would play which queen. It was petrifying, admits Stevenson, but true to the story. “The genius of that idea was that chance was so intrinsic to the story of those two queens,” she says. “A lot of what happens to us in life is absolutely random.”

A keen sense of the arbitrariness of fortune has accompanied Stevenson throughout her life. Her father was in the army, and an itinerant childhood introduced her to a breadth of experience, instilling an early sense of injustice and an affinity with those seeking to belong. As an adult, she’s been heavily engaged in human rights and charity work, particularly on behalf of refugees. She currently has Ukrainian refugees living in her London home.

“We sit at the kitchen table. I check my email for messages from friends or my agent; she checks her phone to see if her family is still alive or if there has been a bomb dropped on her home city overnight. There but for the grace of God . . . ”

It was working on Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden in 1991 that introduced her, personally, to refugees and victims of torture. “When that show finished, I thought, I can’t just leave this community of people who have given me so much,” she says. “It seemed to be a place where what I do for a living and a need could meet . . . Our job [acting] is giving voice to those who can’t give voice. That’s what we do.”

‘The Doctor’, Theatre Royal, Bath, to September 17, theatreroyal.org.uk; then Richmond Theatre, Richmond, September 20-24, atgtickets.com; and Duke of York’s, London, September 29-December 11, thedoctorwestend.co.uk