Harold Pinter Theatre – until 7 October 2023
Reviewed by Claire Roderick
4****
This wonderfully wilfully eccentric production portrays the euphoria and despair of the life of Ignaz Semmelweis as a lyrical fever dream.
Stories of scientific experiment and discovery can be dry, but Semmelweis’s history is ripe with tragedy and comedy, both used wonderfully in Stephen Brown’s play. Semmelweis was a pioneer of medicine – but has been mostly forgotten outside his native Hungary. He gathered evidence that handwashing lowered the death rate from puerperal fever in the obstetric hospital in Vienna. Unfortunately for him, and many thousands of patients, the grandees of science and medicine in mid-nineteenth century Europe dismissed observational evidence without theoretical weight behind it, and Semmelweis and his colleagues had no solid theory about infection, only knowing that their preventative measures worked against it. Add the fact that these were junior doctors daring to contradict accepted theories of infection, and Semmelweis was Hungarian in imperial Austria, and a great leap forward in medicine was largely ignored for decades.
The gripping play begins with Semmelweis (Mark Rylance) running an obstetric ward in Pest with an impressively low death rate among his patients. Former colleagues from Vienna arrive to try to persuade him to return to speak about his hygiene techniques at a conference. Shocked at his angry refusal, his wife Maria (Amanda Wilkin) wants to know about his time in Vienna and Semmelweis and Franz Arneth (Ewan Black) take her, and the audience back to that pivotal time when Semmelweis experienced his first death under his care. The psychological impact and weight of the guilt over the preventable deaths of the women in the hospital are shown physically by a company of dancers and a string quartet representing the ghosts of the women. They watch silently, act out birthing scenes and dance, both gracefully and frenetically to convey Semmelweis’s mental state. The presence of these women, and Maria, watching and commenting amplify the self-judgement of Semmelweis and create almost dreamlike states in between the scientific discussions.
Semmelweis isn’t whitewashed here, and his impatience, lack of communication and diplomatic skills are played brilliantly, making him a noble but frustrating protagonist who is frankly his own worst enemy. Rylance excels playing characters like this, and whether he is fully focussed and rocketing along a train of thought to make a conclusion, stuttering and floundering as he is overcome with emotion or raging incandescently at the “idiots” and “murderers” around him rejecting his findings, Rylance carries the audience effortlessly along the fractured storyline in a coruscating performance. Director Tom Morris keeps a carefully balanced rhythm as the emotions and dramas swirl on Ti Green’s stark black set, reminiscent of asylum/factory/lecture hall and enabling the ghostly women to appear from all levels and maintain their haunting presence.
Mark Rylance’s astonishingly dynamic performance as Semmelweis is the driving force, but the women onstage, especially Wilkin and the wonderfully dry Pauline McLynn as nurse Anna Müller, are the beating heart of the production. Ewan Black, Felix Hayes, Jude Owusu and Daniel York Loh are fantastic as Semmelweis’s long-suffering colleagues, and Alan Williams is suitably officious and patronising as their superior and gatekeeper of established medical and scientific practice.
A tragic story, beautifully told and impeccably acted, Dr Semmelweis is a moving and thought provoking production that will haunt you.