Dr Semmelweis review: A maverick turn from Mark Rylance

There’s the germ of a great production in this play about a pioneering 19th-century doctor who championed hand-washing

Mark Rylance in ‘Dr Semmelweis' (Simon Annand)

The last three years have been so dominated by squirts of soap and sanitising gel that it’s almost impossible to get into a pre-germ mindset. Although conceived by Mark Rylance before the pandemic, there could hardly be a better time to make a play about Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who discovered that making his colleagues wash their hands reduced the mortality rate in his maternity ward.

Semmelweis’s ideas were largely dismissed in an unenlightened medical world that still clung to miasmas and humours. Here, with the help of a crack theatrical team including War Horse director Tom Morris and writer Stephen Brown, Rylance seeks to give the doctor his due, while also kicking up questions of the established vs the experimental, radicals vs the status quo.

The production is fittingly baroque for a show set in 19th-century Vienna: from the beginning, as we settle into Semmelweis’s head and relive his memories, there’s an awful lot going on. As well as the cast, a troupe of ballet dancers – representing ghosts of the dead mothers Semmelweis failed to save – haunt the stage. Meanwhile, a string quartet wanders around playing snatches of Schubert’s pummelling Death and the Maiden, as well as new compositions by Adrian Sutton.