“FOR A DOCTOR, language is precise—a diagnosis has to be specific,” remarks Ruth Wolff, a secular Jewish physician in Robert Icke’s The Doctor. Played with refractory aplomb by Juliet Stevenson, she palpates words for hidden biases, chafes at the use of churched-up terms like “development” in place of the more honest “asking people for money,” and gets in a high dudgeon any time someone confuses “who” for “whom” and “literally” for “figuratively” (and vice versa). An oddity, then, that her name fuses the all-too-apt “wolf” with the benignant “ruth.” The onomastic irony is lost on Wolff’s