By Carol Rocamora . . .
Theater has always reflected the “zeitgeist”—at least that’s been my experience. It’s the most admirable mission of our art form—the “holding of the mirror up to nature” and the times, as Hamlet says.
So when one sees four powerhouse productions in the course of a week on a similar topic—three in London, one soon to open in London—“attention must be paid,” as Arthur Miller famously wrote.
The topic is medical science and its effect on the human body, mind and heart. Does it truly serve, or does it hinder? It’s a universal question, and some of the finest theater artists today are attempting to address it.
Lucy Prebble’s powerful play The Effect, at the Royal National Theatre, features a pair of young participants in a drug trial for a new antidepressant. If that sounds like a depressing topic for a play, it isn’t, trust me. It’s a thrilling new-age Romeo-and-Juliet story of how two young people, thrown together in an impersonal scientific experiment, share the kind of human experience that science can’t control—namely, love. Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) and Connie (Taylor Russell) fall for each other despite the manipulations of their supervising, sparring psychologists, Dr. Lorna James and Dr. Toby Sealey (played by Michele Austin and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, respectively) who are trying to control their responses to the drugs so that the outcome suits their own theories. Dr. Sealy’s self-serving professional motivations for the trial’s outcome are revealed—and so are Dr. James’s romantic feelings for Dr. Sealey.
In the end, neither doctor proves to be trustworthy, nor do the trial’s results. What does emerge, instead, is the power of love to vanquish over science. Tristan and Connie’s feelings for one another cannot be controlled—neither by “two households,” as Shakespeare called the Montagues and Capulets (represented by the sparring doctors), nor by the drug trial they are trying to manipulate for their own purposes. Jamie Lloyd’s sleek direction heightens the tension in this already intense production, staged on Soutra Gilmour’s slick, scientific set, augmented by Jon Clark’s dazzling theatrical lighting.
“I’m dead and my body hasn’t caught up yet,” says the desperate Dr. James, at one point in the play, speaking of her broken heart. The failure of science to understand human behavior—and, indeed, life itself—is also the subject of Next to Normal, the deeply moving musical directed by Michael Longhurst at the Donmar Warehouse about a family trying to live with mental illness. “Which is worse? The symptom or the cure?” is the question, as Diana, a housewife and a mother, struggles with the effects of drug treatment for her bipolar condition. While she experiences memory loss as a result, nothing can erase Diana’s trauma over the loss of her infant son seventeen years ago, nor the great love she feels for him today as he lives on in her imagination as a grown teenager. (No spoiler alert since this musical, with book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey and music by Tom Kitt, won the Pulitzer in 2010 after it opened in New York; so you’ve probably seen it or heard its moving story). As the imaginary son, Jack Wolfe gives a powerful performance, and his electrifying song “I’m Alive!” is unforgettable in its emotional impact. There are wrenching performances by the family’s surviving members—Jamie Parker as the heartbroken husband who cannot reach Diana; Eleanor Worthington-Cox as Diana’s feisty teenage daughter; and, of course, Caissie Levy as Diana, in the center of this emotional family maelstrom. The driving musical score adds an urgency and a poignancy to this family story about love that—as in The Effect—no drug can ever dull, dampen, or destroy.
Meanwhile, American playwright Annie Baker is taking yet another deep dive into the subject of science and the human condition—and a grim one, indeed. Infinite Life is now on its way from the Atlantic Theater Company in New York (where I saw it—see my review here) to the Royal National Theatre in London (it’s a co-production, directed by James Macdonald). The play is set in a medical clinic, like The Effect, only in this case its name and purpose are unspecified, making it more ominous and surreal. We meet five women, lying inert on the clinic’s patio, passing the time, waiting (yes, there are Beckettian overtones). We eventually learn that their problem is chronic pain, which is being treated by strict fasting (a bizarre regimen bordering on the absurd). As the characters share graphic details of the ailments that landed them in that strange clinic in the first place, it is suggested that their pain is more emotional rather than physical—and that what they are suffering from is loneliness and lack of intimacy in their lives. Fasting becomes a metaphor for starvation, as these women hunger desperately for connection and love. “Please call me back, and let me know I’m still alive” one character begs her estranged husband on the phone. Once again, medical science—and again, psychology—is failing to diagnose (let alone cure) the true ailments of the human body and mind.
Then there’s the explosive new play called Dr. Semmelweis, at the West End’s Harold Pinter Theatre, that uncovers a critical episode in the history of medical science and its attempts to relieve human suffering. It concerns a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis who made a ground-breaking discovery in 1847, so basic that it’s almost laughable today. That discovery was simply that surgeons should wash their hands before and after any invasive medical procedure. Renowned actor Mark Rylance did the research and, according to interviews, was so profoundly moved that he co-authored the play himself along with Stephen Brown, determined that the story be brought to light.
Objection to such a basic theory seems ludicrous, in retrospect, especially in post-pandemic times. And yet that constitutes the dramatic conflict of the play. When Semmelweis, a Hungarian obstetrician/ gynecologist, observed that the death rate in the obstetrical ward of his hospital was far less when attended by midwives (who washed their hands) than it was than by medical doctors (who didn’t), he attempted to inform his colleagues in Vienna (considered the center of European medicine in the 19th century). His claim was that rigorous hygiene was the best prevention to the spread of disease and frequency of death in childbirth. But Austrian physicians could not tolerate being lectured to by a doctor from a country they considered to be inferior to theirs.
Hence the issue of hospital hygiene and the prevention of bacterial infection became a political issue, with tragic consequences. Only a few decades later, Louis Pasteur proved Semmelweis to be right, but it was too late for Dr. Semmelweis, that brave pioneer in medicine, who was ultimately confined to a mental hospital and died of sepsis, the very condition he was trying to cure. Now, of course, Semmelweis’s discovery is the cornerstone of modern medicine. “They say it takes forty years for a revolutionary idea to be accepted,” says a character in Dr. Semmelweis—a message that has painful relevance today.
Under Tom Morris’s inspired direction, the production is given a sensational theatrical treatment. Dancers (representing the anguished ghosts of the female patients Dr. Semmelweis was unable to cure) fill the stage with expressionist movement (choreographed by Antonia Franceschi), set to original music by Adrian Sutton. (This striking blend of dance, music and serious drama reminds me of the treatment given to Peter Shaffer’s marvelous 1979 play Amadeus). As you would imagine, Rylance is superb as the tragic hero whose passionate humanism never wavered, not even as he faced hostility, scorn, and ultimately madness. Like Ibsen’s protagonists, he stood alone.
There are a growing number of dedicated playwrights who are boldly tackling the issues of science: Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993), Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998), Caryl Churchill’s A Number (2002), all of which premiered in London. Lucy Prebble joined their ranks in 2017 with Mosquitos, about particle physics (a metaphor for the clash of two sisters) and the issue of the moral responsibility of the scientist. And now we have the above four plays, reminding us, in Mark Rylance’s eloquent words: “The lesson for me is that we should be allowed to be emotional. If we exclude people [like Dr. Semmelweis] because they are emotional, we may well be missing things in our institutions. That is important, I think.”
That goes for the theater, too.
The Effect, which played at the Royal National Theatre, London, has closed;
Next to Normal which played at the Donmar Warehouse, has closed;
Infinite Life is coming to the Royal National Theatre and will run from November 22 through January 13, 2024;
Dr. Semmelweis, which played at the Harold Pinter Theatre, West End, London ran through October 7 and has now closed.
Watch for these productions locally in New York, as they may traverse the pond in the near future.
Cover Photo: Mark Rylance as Dr. Semmelweis (photo: Geraint Lewis)
