Dr. Farokh Udwadia distils learnings from decades of medical practice in his play The Doctor, which tackles the delicate doctor-patient relationship, asks tough questions of the profession as it is practised today, and marks the return of Boman Irani to the stage after 20 years.
By Snigdha Hasan
There is a tender moment towards the beginning of The Doctor, when a 17-year-old in a hospital bed, strapped to beeping and buzzing machines, stops being a survivor of a grisly sexual assault and does what a teenager does. As she laughs and chirps and discusses music, she suspends disbelief in the room for a fleeting minute, perhaps even among an army of doctors whose prognosis is grim. But her eyes are set on Professor Rustom Irani to whom this army reports. There is something about his voice, his presence that tells her she is going to be all right. He believes this too and will do what it takes to not let her faith in him waver.
The audience understands this faith. We have all had that family doctor whose opinion matters most; whose very arrival on the scene is half the treatment. This trust is the pivot on which the delicate, fragile doctor-patient relationship is balanced—a relationship that is now changing, succumbing to mercenary considerations, corporatisation and an overreliance on technology, which is being dangerously mistaken for a replacement for human touch. Dr. Farokh Udwadia has been seeing this from close quarters and has turned to his love for the arts to sound the alarm bells.
“Doctors today relate more to machines and the sad part is that they have conditioned patients to relate to machines too,” said the distinguished physician in a conversation with ON Stage in July 2022 when his play Oganga!, a tribute to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, was staged at the NCPA. The medical missionary’s life was an example to be emulated by healthcare workers of today, Dr. Udwadia believed, and he wanted this message to go out not through lectures or medical conferences, but the medium of theatre. This time, he found inspiration in Viennese dramatist Arthur Schnitzler’s play Professor Bernhardi, written in the years leading up to the First World War.
“People can relate to an art form like theatre. A play dramatises events, and humanises them,” said Dr. Udwadia in a discussion after a staged reading of his play this April at the Experimental Theatre. The staged reading, directed by Bruce Guthrie, Head of Theatre & Films at the NCPA, is a format that offers a rare opportunity to the audience to experience a new work at an early stage of its life.
The Doctor, a contemporary reimagining of Schnitzler’s classic, is steeped in Indian reality and sensibilities, portrayed by a stellar cast with Boman Irani in the lead as Professor Rustom Irani. The veteran doctor and professor of medicine has an immaculate, or as he is told, “a near immaculate” record. He is known for his precise diagnosis and soothing bedside manner—the art of listening to a patient with undivided attention and empathy—a glimpse of which we receive in the opening scenes. While others are caught in a tangle of protocols and bookish definitions of consent and patient autonomy, he follows his conviction, rooted in decades of experience and the wisdom gleaned from them, to do what’s best for the patient. This does not sit well with guardians of religion, the press, social media and the hospital management. A national reckoning ensues.
Irani, who was last seen onstage in the hugely memorable role of Dhunjisha Batliwala in Rahul da Cunha’s I’m Not Bajirao, returns to theatre after 20 years with The Doctor. How much of Dr. Udwadia has he channelled into his character? When Guthrie asked Irani the question after the reading, he spoke of three shades to the character which he tried to portray. Professor Irani with his patients: cheerful and comforting; Professor Irani with his colleagues: firm yet giving; Professor Irani at home, with his wife Silla: at ease with the person to whom he can open up.
There were cues to be picked up from Dr. Udwadia’s impassioned reading of the script when the actor first met him in this regard, but for creative inspiration, Irani also tapped into his own memory as a patient. “I had been admitted to the Parsee General Hospital and in walked Dr. Udwadia on his rounds,” Irani recounted an incident from his childhood. “He finished his thorough examination and then pointed to a bottle of Goya talcum powder on the side table. He asked me if the name rang a bell. It did not. This is when he introduced me to the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya. ‘You must try to see his art someday, my boy,’ he said and walked off,” Irani paused, before addressing the audience. “Every time I visit another country or city, I go to the museum and art gallery first. And I urge parents with Disneyland on their itineraries to give art a chance.”
Art and science mingle in Dr. Udwadia’s definition of medicine. The play is suffused with the music of Bach, his favourite composer, and like young Boman, the girl’s character, played brilliantly by Rhea Amin, decides to give Bach a chance. ‘If you want to know exactly how a human being works, you will be much better off if you had an idea of the humanities. Read poetry, literature and you get a good idea of what suffering is,’ Dr. Udwadia has said in an interview with Bachi Karkaria.
This systemic distance from the patient’s suffering is what pains him. The trust that comes with being in good hands, after all, stokes the will to live. The Doctor received a standing ovation on both evenings of the staged readings at the NCPA, and the audience stayed back to hear more from the playwright. After a lively discussion with Irani and Guthrie, Dr. Udwadia invoked the words of T. S. Eliot from Choruses from ‘The Rock’:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
This article was originally published in the May 2026 issue of ON Stage.
