THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
This is a play about the importance of washing your hands. No, bear with me here.
During Covid we all learned again how vital that is, and scrubbed ourselves like mini Lady Macbeths. But the man who, in 1850s Vienna, stumbled on the scientific importance of antiseptic handwashing in medical procedures (especially obstetrics) was a brave, lone, maverick. Considered a crank, Dr Ignaz Semmelweis was ostracized by both the medical establishment and society and died cruelly in an asylum. Interestingly, just this year, a bust of him was unveiled in Queen Mary University, London by a thankful medical profession, post Covid. His legacy lives on therefore and this great play is a perfect memorial to him.
It's no talkative history lesson though because of two key creative geniuses behind it - the great Sir Mark Rylance who first had the idea and developed the play with Stephen Brown (first at the NT Studio then at the Bristol Old Vic) and director Tom Morris (of War Horse fame). Together they fashioned potentially dry material into a vibrant, utterly theatrical, visual feast. They achieved this working with choreographer Antonia Franceschi and a troupe of dancers including ballerina Oxana Panchenko and the composer Adrian Sutton. Sutton’s searingly dramatic underscoring, such as the incisions during an autopsy, could be from a great Korngold score from the 1940s. The action rides on its waves and the music is played live on stage by a quartet of string players who, with the dancers, are immersed in the drama and also take on supporting roles. This glorious fusion of words, music and movement, which Morris controls with the precision of a clock maker, is staged by designer Ti Green and lighting designer Richard Howell on a cast-iron metallic revolve beneath a beautiful oculus, all displaying the institutional architectural grandeur of mid-19th century Vienna.
Remember, all this was before bacteria was even identified, let alone antibiotics, so doctors and obstetricians, the focus here, were unwittingly killing their patients. Semmelweis, with the help of a statistician, realized that the mortality rates in wards where the women were handled by doctors (the more serious cases) were sky high compared to the wards where the women were nursed by midwives with little or no physical intervention. As you can imagine this created a furore and the establishment, feeling threatened, first did everything they could to undermine his research, then undermined him and finally cast him out.
Interestingly, the type of human behavior which is characterized by a knee-jerk rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms is now labeled in the medical world as the ‘Semmelweis reflex’.
By turns absent-minded, brusque, rambling, and totally lacking an ability to read the room (today he’d be classed ‘on the spectrum’), Semmelweis, being hopeless at ‘office politics’, was his own worst enemy and his battles with the wily boss Dr Klein (Alan Williams) are beautifully calibrated here by Rylance, who is just perfect casting. He deftly captures the wit and the humanity of this troubled visionary but also the stubbornness. His mental decline after his rejection is heartbreaking. Semmelweis died from medical neglect after a beating in a mental asylum.
There’s sterling support from this ensemble cast including Amanda Wilkin as his stalwart (and pregnant) wife, who serves as narrator, and Pauline McLynn (yes, Father Ted’s Mrs. Doyle) as the devoted Chief Nurse in the hospital who perfectly embodies the quiet pragmatism of those women who are eternally underestimated by men.
This is a beautifully bold and urgent tale that deserves to be seen.
