By Stephen Brown with Mark Rylance
Directed by Tom Morris
Designer Ti Green
Choreographer Antonia Franceschi
The National Theatre at the Harold Pinter Theatre, West End
Friday 25th August 2023 19.30
CAST
Mark Rylance- Ignaz Semmelweis
with
Roseanna Andeson – Marja Seidel . Baroness Maria Teresa
Zoe Arshamian – dance ensemble
Joshua Ben-Tovim – hospital porter / Death
Ewan Black- Franz Arneth
Chrissy Brooke – Lisa Elstein
Haim Choi- Suk Hee Apfelbaum, music director, 1st violin
Megumi Eda – Aiko Eda
Sizy Halsreas – Violet-May Blackledge
Felix Hayes – Ferdinand von Hebra
Coco Inman – Sarah Schmidt, 2nd violin
Pauline McLynn – Anna Muller
Jude Owusu – Jakob Kolletschka
Oxana Pancheko- dance ensemble
Shizuku Tatsuno – Oshizo Yukimara & cello
Millie Thomas – Agnes Barta
Max Westwell- hospital porter / Death
Amanda Wilkin – Maria Semmelweis
Alan Williams- Johann Klein
Daniel York Loh- Karl von Rakitansky
Patricia Zhou- dance ensemble
Kasia Ziminska – Esther Horowitz, viola
Both plays this weekend are 2020 Lockdown replacements. This was originally a Bristol Old Vic production.
We had pre-Covid tickets for Bristol. I think it was one of the few with no refund too. Anyway, three years later it has gained a doctorate in the title, moved to the West End, and the ticket price has gone from £35 to £75. That’s partly Bristol v London, but not only. Our hotel room was double what we were paying pre-lockdown in the same hotel. It’s what the government call 8% inflation.
Mark Rylance co-wrote it and stars. It’s at the Harold Pinter Theatre, one of the ‘less bad’ West End Theatres. The seats have decent leg room and the toilets are almost adequate.
It’s the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who discovered that childbirth fever, killing so many women, was sepsis due to bad hygiene, and infection was spreading from doctors going straight from dissecting cadavers for research and going to deliver babies without even washing their hands. He worked in Vienna, at the world’s biggest hospital, and realized that the mortality rate in the doctors’ ward was far worse than in the adjacent midwives’ ward.
It is a hugely theatrical production, incorporating ballet, modern dance, a string quartet on stage who provide both music and sound effects. Lighting is highly effective. The auditorium, and the theatre boxes are used well.
The ballet scene (Semmelweis, Nurse Muller and his colleagues are all at a ballet in Vienna, which Semmelweis interrupts) requires traditional theatre boxes – Mark Rylance and Pauline McLynn join the occupants. They would have to build them into the set in a modern theatre. We were lucky, being seated on the left of the auditorium we could see Semmelweis and Muller, though nothing of their colleagues in the opposite box on our side. Pauline McLynn, as the acerbic chief midwife, carries a lot of the funny lines, though Rylance can always produce a funny line even in the most serious situations.
The set has a revolve stage, emphasizing the world moving around Semmelweis as he struggles to find his way through. After the interval, the surrounding neat balcony has a broken section, reflecting Semmelweis’s own breakdown.
The doctors’ ward in Vienna is marked by the ringing of the priest’s bell for last rites. Bells rang for us too as we watched the head obstetrician, Professor Klein (Alan Williams). Mule-headed senior obstetricians is the theme, and one we know. I’m going back 45 years. Poole Hospital was headed by a man who believed every birth should be an induction, and they had years with no births on Christmas Day then by using induction to avoid it, though 39 years later my grandson was indeed born on Christmas Day in the very same hospital. Things get better. Anyway, back in 1978 the head guy said Karen needed an induction because the baby was late, but too small. We got a second opinion from another senior in obstetrics who said the baby was early but too large. After a 22 hour induction, a young Australian doctor delivered by ventouse. He said if his boss had been there, it would have been a Caesarean for certain. He also said judging by the coating, he was early and needed another week or two. The boss popped in next day to inform Karen in a nasty triumphant manner that she could only have caesareans in future. Well, subsequently she had two entirely natural births delivered by midwives with not a doctor in sight. So the theme that female midwives know more about birth than pig-headed male doctors resonated. Both seniors we met were bullying pompous misogynistic arseholes and both wrong, which was the norm at their level in 1978 – I quote a doctor friend there. The young Australian was great.
Members of the cast have been eloquent in illuminating the ways in which even today the female body remains subject to a fragile and incomplete system of scientific enquiry, all too often framed around the myth of a lone, wild, male genius.
Tom Morris, Director, programme essay
The contamination by doctor came out in a survey some years ago. British surgeons put on suits (blue pinstriped) to visit patients post-operation. It was discovered that while you wash shirts and dry clean suits, surgeons’ ties had more bacteria than hospital toilet seats. American surgeons, in contrast, put on fresh green scrubs to do the post-operative ward round, with short sleeves, so bare arms (you can sanitise and scrub your skin). This now seems to the practice in the UK with a new generation.
The take is told as a long flashback to Vienna 18 years or so earlier when Semmelweis had the confrontation with the Viennese hospital authorities who didn’t accept his findings. He has been in Budapest since, running his own maternity hospital with a 99.15% survival rate. The script mentions Hungarian nationalism and a refusal to speak in German a couple of times. Certainly, Vienna looked down on its provincials in the Hapsburg empire, though to this day single signposts in Vienna show the way to Budapest (Hungary), Prague (Czech Repubic) and Bratislava (Slovakia).
The fact that the males are surrounded by lithe young dancing females stresses the story. Mark Rylance is a dance participant and as well as balletic moves does full ballet lifts too. We always guessed he was good at everything. The dance has straight ballet, but also visceral fierce shaking trembling dance (like the stages of childbirth or of childbirth-fever too?) with vocal grunts that reminded us of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre in the 1970s. It’s marvellous and innovative.
… the dancers are pushed further than ballet and contemporary to embody the huge range of emotion the play asks: joy, grief, sorrow, empathy and hope for starters … I love Julio Horvath’s (the creator of Gyrotonics) principals, as it directs the body using breath circles and imagery. It’s important to see shapes, then what those shapes evoke, as well a unused space.
Antonia Franceschi, choreographer, programme essay
The costume has the dancers, musicians and the expectant mothers all in the same base costume with thin wispy skirts, wraith like. There are four ‘real women’ in solid 19th century dress: Lisa Semmelweis, Nurse Muller and the Baroness and her attendant. The rest is his recollection, spirits, patients from the past.
Rylance’s Semmelweis is obsessive in his mission to save women, and given to repetitive ranting and sudden explosions of rage. Rylance has his trademark pausing, but adds something slightly odd in the accent. Not a regional accent, but a man who just speaks differently. I can think of three super-intelligent obsessives of my acquaintance who share something of this vocal quality. He presents a highly intelligent man, I would employ the broad and wildly over-used term ‘autistic’ with the obsessiveness and sudden rage. This is a man who cares passionately about ‘womankind’ in general but cannot deal with real people, such as his wife Lisa, Nurse Muller, or the visiting baroness on a personal level. I have met so many who care passionately about politics / animals / trees / the environment but can’t relate to individual humans.
There is a circularity. Here is the man who discovered the importance of hand washing, something reinforced massively in the pandemic, yet constant hand-washing is about the most common form of OCD. As with Covid, hand-washing is the main simple defence (or was held to be so at the time – being coughed over and air droplets were worse to my mind).
I hadn’t expected the ‘cadaverous particles’ from dissection to be the basis for the discrepancy between doctors and midwives. I thought it would simply be that women made more effort in washing their hands and clothes in general, which has been my entire life experience (note how many men do not wash their hands in public toilets), but apparently it wasn’t that simple.
The reason for the real Semmelweis’s breakdown is not known this many years later, and Wiki speculates early onset Alzheimer’s or perhaps syphilis, caught from treating prostitutes free and delivering their babies, which would be ironic. Whatever, he died of gangrene after a severe beating by guards in a mental hospital.
Programme: Absolutely superb. Excellent essays from those involved.
The combination of drama, dance and music puts it at my highest level. Good text too. Five stars.
Overall: *****
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
It’s hard to see why you’d drop a star.
5 star
Kate Kellaway, Observer *****
Quentin Letts, Sunday Times (Bristol 2022) *****
4 star
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ****
Domenic Maxwell, The Times ****
Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail ****
Andrzej Lukowski Time Out****
Nick Curtis, Standard ****
Neil Norman, Daily Express ****
Marianka Swain, London Theatre ****
Arifa Akbar, Guardian (Bristol 2022) ****
3 star
Tim Bano, Independent ***
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
MARK RYLANCE
Nice Fish by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins
Farinelli & The King, by Claire Van Kampen, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2015
Richard III – Apollo 2012 Mark Rylance as Richard III
Twelfth Night – Apollo 2012 Mark Rylance as Olivia
Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, West End
La Bête by David Hirson, West End, 2010
+ film and TV
Wolf Hall, TV Series (as Thomas Cromwell)
Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Speilberg
Dunkirk, directed by Christopher Nolan
Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay
Phantom of The Open
+ director
Much Ado About Nothing (Old Vic)
FELIX HAYES
The Tempest, RSC 2012 (Trinculo)
Twelfth Night, RSC 2012 (Fabian)
Comedy of Errors, RSC 2012 (Dromio of Ephesus)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, RSC 2011 (Snug)
The City Madam, RSC 2011 (Mr Plenty)
Cardenio, RSC 2011 (Shepherd)
Vice Versa, RSC 2017 (General Braggadacio)
PAULINE MCLYNN
The Knight of The Burning Pestle, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2014
Cymbeline, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2015
AMANDA WILKIN
A Midsummer Nights Dream, Globe 2019 (Helena)
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