Mark Rylance and Tom Morris on the torment of a doctor ahead of his time

“Wash your hands!” It’s a mantra that has rung around the world over the past two years. But for Ignaz Semmelweis, that simple instruction would cost him his health, his job and even his sanity.

A Hungarian doctor working in 1840s Vienna, Semmelweis realised that better hygiene could save women’s lives by cutting post-partum infection. Yet his modest proposal that physicians sanitise their hands before deliveries caused ructions, putting him at loggerheads with his superiors. He ended his days in an asylum, dying — with horrible irony — of sepsis.

It’s a story that clicked with Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance when he came across a short biography by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. “It’s a very, very angry book,” he says, waving the small volume at the camera when we talk over Zoom. “Extraordinary. It paints Semmelweis as an outsider and a victim of the stupid authorities — an attractive story to me!”

Rylance took the idea to Tom Morris, award-winning co-director of War Horse and artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic theatre, where the resulting play, Dr Semmelweis, is about to open, with Rylance in the lead and Morris directing. But once they had dug into the tale, they found something more complex.

“We discovered a much more interesting story,” says Rylance. “He wasn’t just a victim. He was also a very difficult person: someone who got very angry about people not understanding him and became his own worst enemy. Which maybe a lot of pioneers are — they’re people who cut through and are not the most polite or politically savvy people.”

He grins and takes a sip of his red wine. Next to him, Morris opens a packet of nuts. It’s Friday evening, after rehearsals in Bristol, and actor and director are unwinding, following a week of wrangling with the torment of a man ahead of his time.

The idea of the outsider appealed to them both. Rylance, one of our most brilliant, mercurial actors, is superb at portraying loners and mavericks: Iago, Hamlet, Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall and the charismatic, roistering outlaw, Johnny “Rooster” Byron, in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem — a role he is reprising in London this April. Many of Morris’s greatest successes, meanwhile, have been daring ventures: War Horse, Jerry Springer: The Opera and Touching the Void, which recreated a mountaineering crisis on stage.

The two felt an affinity with this awkward, visionary doctor whose exasperation undermined his cause. Semmelweis noted that of two maternity wards in Vienna’s General Hospital, the one staffed by student doctors, rather than midwives, had a much higher death rate. He realised that the doctors were attending births after performing autopsies, bringing infection with them. But this was decades before Louis Pasteur’s discovery around micro-organisms, and Semmelweis’s thinking caused huge upset, despite demonstrably working.

“At that time autopsy was really new,” says Rylance. “It was a new, cutting edge of science. And they were making great headway. There was great hope in it. And for Semmelweis to be saying, ‘Actually, fellas, you coming straight from an autopsy without really cleaning your hands to help a woman give birth is killing that patient,’ was a pretty hard pill to take.”

It went down badly at an institutional level as well, says Morris. “The Vienna General Hospital really saw itself as a pioneering force for good and was revolutionary in terms of the development of medical science. If you’re in that sort of position . . . you’re very vulnerable to blindness. You’ve got too much at stake.”

It’s a story that digs into the knotty mix of personality and politics that can make or mar scientific discovery. But what’s striking is the resonance it has acquired since those early conversations. The finished play, written by Stephen Brown with Rylance, opens amid a health crisis featuring daily battles about medical expertise and personal choice. Against that backdrop, the drive to understand why people resist ideas, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, feels all the more urgent, says Morris. “It does seem to me profoundly important now that we learn how not to call the people who disagree with us ‘enemies’. Part of this play is an opening out of that question.”

But what also fascinated the team was emotion’s role in the story. Semmelweis’s compassion galvanised his discovery. But it ran counter to the conventional wisdom that progress requires cool rationality — the idea that, as Morris puts it, “emotion is like steam on the glass, which is going to make you see less clearly”. It meant too that he was haunted by the women who had died in agony and the implications of his failure.

Dr Semmelweis aims to honour that empathy and those lost women. Alongside female characters whose views go unheeded by the medical establishment, there is a leitmotif drawn from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” running through the piece, played by an all-female string quartet. A corps de ballet (choreographed by Antonia Franceschi) symbolises the countless women lost to puerperal infection, an idea inspired by ballets such as Swan Lake and Giselle, says Rylance. “There is a very strong presence of women who are voiceless but expressing themselves through music and movement.”

Rylance’s alertness to the potential of dance is no surprise. He can be an electric presence on stage, with his precise physicality and ability to shape-shift with each role. As Rooster Byron, he seemed to grow in stature; as Peter Isherwell, the technology chief executive in the recent film Don’t Look Up, he projected a creepy serenity. For Dr Semmelweis, he’s channelling something of Buster Keaton’s mute expressiveness. He and Morris are exploring the “physicality of innocence and the physicality of experience” as the play flips back and forth between the doctor’s older and younger selves.

The potency of movement onstage hit Rylance forcefully during his decade running Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. “We didn’t have lights and sound to give focus, so the relationship between stillness and movement, silence and sound became really crucial.” He learnt too the importance of working with the distinctive imaginative energy of each audience.

That chemistry was clear in Jerusalem. Even a decade on, I still recall the hair-raising charge in the air at the end of that show, with Rylance, centre stage, pounding a drum and exhorting sleeping giants to rise. “That was created by all of you [the audience] as much as me,” he says. “We were together in that moment. People would tell me they saw giants or they saw the caravan catch on fire. And I’d say, ‘No it didn’t.’ And they’d say, ‘Yes, yes, I saw it.’”

That live connection is what brings Rylance back to theatre to revive Rooster Byron (which he hopes to do once a decade) and breathe life into Ignaz Semmelweis. Film, he says, “just does not come near”.

“I haven’t really discovered in my life how to get a similar intimate experience as I do when I’m in a great play,” he says. “There is an intimacy in the performance with an audience that is very, very heightened. A sense of liveness. That idea that humanity is capable of greater thinking in a group than individually is very strong. It happens in theatre.”

‘Dr Semmelweis’, Bristol Old Vic, January 20-February 12, bristololdvic.org.uk; ‘Jerusalem’, Apollo Theatre, London, April 16-August 6, jerusalemtheplay.co.uk