Ruth Leon Pocket Review

Dr Semelweiss – Harold Pinter Theatre

“Wash your hands”. Sounds so simple, is so simple for those of us with access to hot water and soap, a 20-second ritual we perform without conscious thought several times a day. The admonition was reinforced during the Covid pandemic as a positive injunction, something we could actually do to help ourselves not to get infected and not to infect others.

But what if we didn’t know that washing the hands removes not just visible dirt but also bacteria and germs?

In 1847, in Vienna’s main hospital, a certain Dr Semmelweis, a young doctor working in the maternity wards, had the radical idea that it was bacteria on the hands of doctors who had lately been performing autopsies, that was causing the high rate of deaths among the patients. Nobody believed him because he couldn’t back up his beliefs with science, even when he instituted hand-washing for everyone who was in contact with the patients, and the deathrates plummeted.

This is the unpromising premise for Dr. Semmelweis, the latest exemplary performance in Mark Rylance’s unbroken succession. He plays Semmelweis as a man so obsessed with the rightness of his theory that he is positively unhinged by it, becoming increasingly frustrated until he tips over into actual madness. His self-righteousness and humourlessness don’t help and when even his devoted wife, pregnant and in need of his attention, is unable to distract him, he finds himself alone. But right.

There are some actors I’d pay to see even if I had no idea what play they were acting in or what it was about. Mark Rylance is high on that list and if I tell you not to miss his current perfomance in Dr Semmelweis, you almost need no more information than that. But that would be to short change all the other splendid features of this production.

The director Tom Morris, writer Stephen Brown and Mark Rylance himself, whose idea it was, have adapted an obscure biography into a thoroughly rewarding evening which at times is as much ballet and concert as a play. It includes an on-stage string quartet and a troupe of dancers who serve as a sort of Greek chorus and who represent the ghosts of the women who have died as a result of the doctors’ ignorance.

Everybody deserves a mention here – sets, costumes, music, choreography, sound, lighting – as well as the actors in this large cast as nurses, doctors and administrators, all of whom are very fine.

This is a remarkable theatrical concept, fully realised, and a story worth telling. Dr Semmelweis comes together as a glorious whole, a play entirely worthy of your time and money.

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