BIRTH, DEATH, SCIENCE , ANGER
“The smell – the smell – the sheets…” Curtain up, he is gripped by urgency, past or present. . Now a successful doctor home in Hungary, he turns back to play chess with his pregnant wife, joking and fond. It is the only time he will seem briefly peaceful, for we are meeting him at a late mid-point of a journey through life and work. Good work: under 1% maternal mortality in his hospital. In a moment old colleagues will call, begging him to return to Vienna and speak about his success. The request will send him, and us, back to his early work in Vienna and then forward to betrayal and death. We will, with him, be haunted through this poetic, balletic play by ghosts emerging from the deep black background of his mind: memories of women lost to childbirth fevers. Musical, graceful, tragic figures.
For back in the 1840s, young Ignatz Semmelweis was distressed by the way that young women gave birth successfully, then in great numbers died of puerperal fever. It was a time of scientific excitement in medicine, his boss Johann Klein extolling an end to “potions and lotions and ancient texts”, conducting autopsies into the messy miraculous human body and – significantly – telling his distressed young assistant never to carry the ghosts of dead patients with him, but to scrub them off like barnacles and sail on.
Semmelweis can’t. He is distressed that local women beg and plead to go on the midwives’ ward not the doctors’ one. Why? Because three times fewer die there. Defying Klein, who says it’s all about windows, he scans the archives and theorizes that it may be because only doctors may work in the “deathhouse”, and so bring “cadaverous fragments” to their ward: the smell of autopsies is horribly like that of dying women’s bodies…
He inaugurates chlorine handwashing for all; survival dramatically improves. A minor injury provokes a further intellectual leap: maybe any “decaying organic matter” of any kind, not just off cadavers, does it? He has discovered sepsis, years before Pasteur’s microbiology and ideas of bacteria. The medical establishment scoffs, Semmelweis kicks off. It doesn”t end well for his career but thousands of mothers and babies are saved, simply by handwashing.
Its a brilliant true story, and no surprise that Mark Rylance spotted it and, with Stephen Brown , co-wrote the play. For it is a Rylance role if ever there was one: a flawed heroic genius, acquainted with grief, antennae quivering, always on the edge of crazed anger. Tom Morris as director finds a perfect framing for its troubling oddity: expressive choreographed movement by Antonia Franceschi with Adrian Sutton’s score, many of the women playing instruments as they float into memory. The sacred-monster energy of Rylance shivers and shatters: this is scientific hero as difficult bastard, as nerdy obsessive, emotionally intense and teetering between rant and nervous mutter. He is disastrously undiplomatic (an unforgettable moment iswhen Roseanna Anderson’s stately Baroness Maria Theresa arrives willing and interested in supporting the work, but on flinching from the acrid chlorine washing-bowl is violently shoved away from the ward door by Semmelweis as “murderously” dirty. Klein and the snobbish medical establishment consider him even more nuts and dangerous after that.
There are moments of earthy medical pragmatism – a lovely, if finally tragic, friendship with Pauline McLynn’s Nurse Muller, and crazy moments: a ticket to the ballet and ends up with him so distraught about a young dancer’s death under his hands that when the ballet shows Death taking young women he invades the stage and tackles the male dancer. No idea whether that really happened, but the Semmelweis as played by the glorious Rylance definitely would have.
Throughout the time-shifts and memories there is the sad calming voice of his wife (Amanda Wilkin), who unlike him understands that it with new ideas it is no use “crossing the river and shouting furiously from the other side” unless you build a bridge:don’t just demand others plunge into the unknown waters. When Semmelweis returns to Vienna and tells a sceptical medical conference they are all murderers, the end feels inevitable.
It’a a haunting play, beautifully theatrical, unexpectedly topical after our Covid years of desperate medical searching, raging disagreement, politics and deaths . One of those nights when you for a while think it is a truly great play, then maybe hesitate, then realize that maybe it is, and that you will be as haunted by it as Semmelweis himself, caught up in the massive grief of deaths which spring dark from the fresh joy of childbirth. Remarkable.
box office haroldpintertheatre.co.uk to 7 October
rating five
theatreCat 