A few months ahead of bringing “Rooster” Byron’s band of outsiders back to the stage in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, Mark Rylance breathes life into a very different kind of anti-establishment figure: Dr Ignaz Semmelweis, a pioneer too ahead of his own time.
Based on an original idea by Rylance and written with Stephen Brown, this play explores the life of the Hungarian doctor who worked in 19th-century Vienna’s maternity wards. Semmelweis’s groundbreaking practices in antiseptic procedure saved thousands of lives – particularly those of impoverished mothers – and might have saved more had his findings been recognised by the medical community. But he was doubted and disbelieved, and died in an asylum without due recognition and, in a final twist of bad fate, of sepsis, from which he had battled to save his patients.
