Ignaz Semmelweis was an Hungarian obstetrician whose emphasis on the importance of hygiene and concept of what is now known as bacterial infection predated the work of the better known Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister by decades.
Stephen Brown’s play, written with Mark Rylance whose idea it was, presents him as a man exasperated in his struggle against an entrenched medical establishment but driven by the memory of deaths that could have been avoided if doctors themselves had not carried infection from wounds and autopsies to the women in their maternity wards.
It begins in Ignaz Semmelweis’s home in Pest where former colleagues from his days in Vienna come to beg him to return there to present his ideas to a medical conference in the city which had rejected him when he first put them forward. It then looks back to his early days as a doctor and his work at the Vienna hospital and finally lets his wife Maria (Amanda Wilkin) complete his story.
This is a play in which past and present often co-exist and director Tom Morris often emphasises this. Semmelweis’s concern was expressly awakened when an early patient, a young ballerina, died of puerperal fever (“childbed" as it was commonly known). A string quartet and a group of ethereal dancers represent the dead women he is always aware of, while in real life, a drunk Semmelweis finds himself fighting death in an opera house.
With Adrian Sutton’s music and Antonia Franceschi’s choreography and an elegant setting by Ti Green where elements are outlined against a velvety blackness and an oculus overhead adds emphasis to Richard Howell’s lighting, this is a very stylish production. Students carrying out autopsies are visually paired with women in childbirth.
Establishment medicine is represented by hospital head Professor Klein (Alan Williams), his mind closed to Semmelweis’s ideas, while Daniel York Loh as senior instructor Karl von Rokitansky is encouraging.
Semmelweis is backed up by colleagues Ferdinand von Hebra (Felix Hayes) and Jakob Kolletschka (Jude Owusu), Jakob’s death a key factor in shaping his thinking, but it is the experience of long-serving nurse Anna Muller, a compassionate figure perfectly played by Pauline McLynn, that clinches his theory.
This is a strong cast giving committed performances around Mark Rylance’s intense, quirky central character, a man who doesn’t know how to charm and gains our support rather than our sympathy.
The presence of death (personified in Max Wetwell’s silver-masked dancer) and those other ghost dancers gives dramatic edge and the production’s various elements (not least some excellent mime on the part of the doctors) combine to form a fine piece of theatre that sometimes invades the auditorium. It discusses bacteria that thrive on putrefaction, but it looks lovely and is always engaging.