It was Mark Rylance who elected to bring Dr Semmelweis on to the stage with the help of writer Stephen Brown and director Tom Morris. The collaboration began during the pandemic when handwashing was in the headlines – appropriately, in that Semmelweis’s discovery, in 1847, was that he could save women dying of puerperal fever in childbirth, on the wards of Vienna’s general hospital, by getting doctors to wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution. More challenging was persuading a conservative, high-handed Viennese medical profession to listen to the findings of a loose cannon of a Hungarian doctor with poor communication skills. This show had a sellout run in Bristol last year and has now been repurposed in a magnificently polished new draft for the West End.
Designer Ti Green’s hospital is a gilded period piece – as poised as the medical knowledge of the period was unsteady, with not an antiseptic surface in sight. But it is for Rylance’s character study of the doctor that this show is a must-see (the medical history is of interest too). Rylance’s Semmelweis is a stiff, formally tormented soul with a little black moustache. In his quieter moments, he looks like one of those 19th-century photographs in which sitters are obliged to keep their faces still lest movement wreck everything. He has an uncanny ability to convey distress through his body, almost without moving: the inward becoming outward.
