The Mark of a smash hit

Mark Rylance was recently seen as a bonkers billionaire with huge teeth in the film Don’t Look Up. But now he’s back on stage – and high time too. Before he returns to the West End in April for a rerun of the hit play Jerusalem, he’s in this cracking new show he has co-written with Stephen Brown. It’s the true story of a maverick Hungarian doctor in 19th Century Vienna whose breakthrough discovery saved the lives of thousands of new mums.

The show is a real trophy for artistic director Tom Morris, who has lured Rylance (left, with Clemmie Sveaas) to make his debut at the Bristol Old Vic. Although the play was conceived several years ago, its subject – rampaging infection, handwashing and disputed science – is bang on the money.

Thin hair greased down and gabbling ten to the dozen, Rylance is mesmeric as the medical boffin obsessed by the appalling death rate (one in ten) in the maternity wing of the Vienna General Hospital. The ghosts of the dead mothers are dancers (wonderful, writhing choreography by Antonia Franceschi) with a live string quartet that permeates the action with Adrian Sutton’s sinuous music.

What on earth is causing these deaths? Medics mime horribly grisly dissections of mothers with veins ‘like sprigs of blackened thyme’ whose bodies offer no answers. Then, in a Poirot moment – the insanitary doctors are the cause of death! – Semmelweis makes his great deduction, only to hit the buffers of establishment denial. His lancet-sharp tongue wins him few friends, and symptoms of madness start to appear.

Rylance is of course a joy to watch, but this is very much a company show, with Jackie Clune injecting the evening with wry insights as the humble midwife and good work, too, from Semmelweis’s colleagues and Thalissa Teixeira as his devoted wife Maria.

The play comes across as a touching lament written in movement. It’s also a fascinating medical whatdunnit in the age before bacteria were known about. And it never lets you forget the terrible cost of entrenched male thinking. The Old Vic has a smash hit on its hands.