★★★★☆ Dear England
Our friends across the Atlantic dote on their state-of-the-nation epics, and Dear England is a prime example of the form. The aware and prolific (Ink; Quiz; Finding Neverland The Musical) James Graham employs soccer – oops, sorry, football – as his central metaphor, noting that England haven’t taken home a significant championship, nor even come particularly close, since the World Cup triumph of 1966. Is it coincidental that the next six decades have been roiled by unrest and disunity? If a country with so much talent and so many resources seems to have lost the will to prevail on the footy pitch, what does that portend for that country’s future on the world stage?
The Olivier stage is peopled with old school naysayers who deny any such connection, but Gareth Southgate, the current real-life manager of Team England, is not one of them. As played intensely yet diffidently by Joseph Fiennes, Southgate believes that common ground between his all-stars and the fans needs to be cultivated. To that end he enlists real-life psychologist Pippa Grange (Gina McKee) to teach the players – and by extension, the nation – how to cope with failure in order to lay the groundwork for success. (You can imagine what the Old Guard think about her input.) Failing is something to which Gareth can relate, given a playing career largely remembered for his blowing the 1996 World Cup semifinal “penalty shootout” that sent Germany, which England had bested 30 years before, into the finals. Yikes! My fellow Red Sox fans can substitute Bill Buckner or Bucky F***ing Dent as a rough analogue.
Southgate has his moments of brooding and is consoled by Grange, but as befits a central character who’s still around and presumably cooperative, we don’t delve much deeper into his psyche. Instead, Graham delves into England’s. Even as director Rupert Goold and his design team find imaginative and varied ways to bring the excitement of the pitch to fever pitch on stage, a half-century’s worth of stock-taking allows Graham to cast a baleful eye on not just the ruling elite, but the “old boy network” of sports management, racism, Brexit, fan hooliganism, the cult of celebrity, and the late pandemic among other hot-button issues. As entertainingly portrayed here, all have had an impact on, and been impacted by, the sport, and a nice balance is achieved in the storytelling. (I especially enjoyed the parade of prime ministers trotting on to express their rote platitudes, to the hilarity of the home team audience.)
Graham’s knowing focus on his native land is so keen that some of his work might not travel well. Ink did, partly because Rupert Murdoch is in our heads just as much as, if not more than, those in the UK; so did the teleseries of Quiz, thanks to our affinity for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Best of Enemies, reliving the 1968 Gore Vidal/Bill Buckley debates, likely would win U.S. favor, but to my knowledge, the insider’s look at Parliament This House (arguably the playwright’s very best) hasn’t been staged here. If Dear England, with its cast of over two score and a subject of minimal American interest, never shows up stateside, I can still wish that we had our own homegrown playwright to craft a similarly heartfelt argument promoting our unified purpose and pride.
★★☆☆☆ Dr Semmelweis
Hungarian-born Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), who located the remedy for puerperal (childbed) fever in doctors’ hand-washing, fell apart under the ridicule of the Viennese medical establishment and died in a madhouse. His tale has been dramatized at least three times before, and as Dr Semmelweis it offers a plum part for the intensely feeling yet cerebral Mark Rylance, whose brainchild this evidently was. Shaped by Stephen Brown and Rylance at the Bristol Old Vic, it’s come to the West End under the aegis of Sonia Friedman’s producing group and the National Theatre.
Rylance’s trademark penetrating stares, halting delivery, and strangled voice seeming to birth ideas from outer space make for typically fascinating viewing. And the horrific toll that puerperal fever took on mothers and newborns, well into the 19th century, can’t be retold often enough. Particularly in the current political climate, with (male) authority figures once more rudely intervening in the rights and health of mothers and children.
Those elements aside, Brown and Rylance’s script could, with a few expletives deleted, easily have been assigned to Paul Muni for a Warner Bros. Great Man biopic of the 1930s. It’s achingly predictable: A far-seeing outsider is struck by a mystery. Supported by a sympathetic wife (here Amanda Wilkin, wasted in a nothingburger role) he bucks the authorities to test his theories. A friend is sacrificed. Initial success is followed by setbacks, and eventually by the triumph of the man’s ideas, if not his personal well-being. Erich Wolfgang Korngold music up full.
This treatment flatters the audience shamelessly. We all know that washing one’s hands is essential to well-being, so we smugly feel superior: “If I’d been there, I certainly would have washed my hands. Such idiots they were back then.” The play also suggests that Semmelweis is to be commended precisely because he took a position against the prevailing wisdom. But if that were so, praise should be laden upon those who argue that alkyl nitrites caused AIDS, or “Jewish space lasers” target Santa. Being a crank doesn’t automatically validate unorthodox ideas, and being driven insane when others take issue with one’s positions doesn’t necessarily ennoble.
Director Tom Morris (co-helmer of War Horse) has included a variety of aural and visual devices, including young women (“The Mothers,” they’re called) clad in designer Ti Green’s beige shifts, who periodically engage in elaborate dance with a live string quartet in accompaniment. Whereas (for example) the horses in Equus, similarly sidelined, physically embody the seduction of young Alan Strang, this ensemble is just intrusive. Choreographer Antonia Franceschi claims The Mothers “represent hope, grief, joy, memory, rage, sorrow.” I expect they do, but the stage pictures that result are monotonous and inexpressive.
I wonder that no one ever puts the opponents of great innovators front and center. Their insistence on being wrong is far more interesting, and human, than those who end up in the right. In this play, Semmelweis’s clinic boss Dr. Klein is given pointed counterarguments to our hero’s theories, presented forcefully by the sturdy, super-articulate actor Alan Williams. Yet instead of setting Klein and his deputy to a true, illuminating battle of ideas, the script just prompts us to jeer at Klein’s insistence on upgrading the hospital’s windows to air out the wards.
Me, I ask myself: What is the pathology of institutional orthodoxy? Wherefore the obstinacy? What must a Klein have felt when proof of microbes’ existence finally validated the long-dead Semmelweis? What guilt did he experience upon contemplating the deaths of countless women to which his pigheaded vanity and window fixation contributed?
The consequences of being profoundly wrong: Now that’s a moral dilemma that could make for a play.
Dr. Semmelweis opened July 11, 2023, at the Harold Pinter Theatre (London) and runs through October 7. Tickets and information: nationaltheatre.org.uk
