WITCH HUNT

Juliet Stevenson stars in "The Doctor."

- HELEN SHAW

Juliet Stevenson’s voice is one of the most frightening things I ever saw. In April, 2021, with much of New York performance still under pandemic interdict, Simon Stephens’s socially distanced adaptation of José Saramago’s “Blindness” came to the Daryl Roth Theatre. The show was basically a radio drama: audience members sat in pairs six feet apart, wearing headphones, listening to a recording of Stevenson telling a horror story about a plague. Her vocal timbre has a supercompressed quality, as suspenseful as a steel spring. In a dark room, in a dark year, her disembodied voice and its magnificent tension leaped straight to my optic nerve, making phantoms flicker inside my eyelids, sonic energy becoming light.

In “The Doctor,” a British production now at the Park Avenue Armory, the inthe-f lesh Juliet Stevenson (a compact ramrod in the Glenda Jackson mold) maintains that sense of matter under strain. Wisely, her director-playwright, Robert Icke, exploits it every way he can. The two-hour-and-forty-five-minute show keeps Stevenson onstage for almost its entire length, even during the intermission—the minimalist gray carpeted turntable stage, designed by Hildegard Bechtler, rotates, slowly, beneath her feet. (The room is her autoclave.) A voice like Stevenson’s can make an argument take on heat and power, thrust and excitement. Of course, the wheels might fall off that argument. The play might grind itself into the dirt. But Stevenson’s motive force keeps pushing the thing whether it moves or not, combative energy becoming, somehow, pure fight.