Like an episode of Play School: Dr Semmelweis, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

Bleach and germs are the central themes of Dr Semmelweis, written by Mark Rylance and Stephen Brown. The opening scene, set in the 1860s, presents the harmless old doctor as a charming oddball who adores playing chess with his happy, clever wife. This is code: Semmelweis is an intellectual and a feminist whom it’s safe to like.

We flip back to 1837 and meet Semmelweis as a student at a Viennese maternity hospital where the male doctors kill three times as many patients as the female nurses. How come? Well, the males sport filthy aprons spattered with their victims’ blood while the nurses wear freshly laundered habits. So the high mortality rate is caused by germs. And germs can be treated with bleach.

Of course the audience knows this already but it takes 80 long minutes for the characters to catch up with 19th-century science. En route, the show delivers a series of distractions and delaying mechanisms which clutter the stage and try to disguise the script’s dramatic inertia and psychological blandness.

In one overloaded scene, a mime artist conducts an autopsy while a handful of clueless doctors pore over his every move. Meanwhile a quartet of string players grind out some Schubert while a troupe of ballerinas in diaphanous cladding mimic the horrors of childbirth through the medium of expressive dance.

At the same time, a lot of beds are being trundled around with their mattresses occupied by doomed mothers screaming blue murder as they give birth to dead babies. There’s so much to watch here and so little to care about.

The surfeit of effects makes the production look like the graduation show at a drama school where the students display their skills in acting, mime, dance, musicianship and public recital.