Strange Loop / Dr. Semmelweis

London July 2023

A Strange Loop has come to London trailing a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2022 Tony awards for Broadway’s best musical and best musical book. With book, lyrics and music by Michael R. Jackson, a gay black man, it’s a theatrical matryoshka that revolves around an usher named Usher, a gay black man writing a play about a gay black man who’s writing a play…

Throughout Usher’s desperate effort to define himself in a world that can’t wait to define him, he’s tormented by “extremely obnoxious thoughts.” Regardless of gender and color, five men and one woman portray them all, not only his “daily self-loathing” and “supervisor of sexual ambivalence” but also his mother, father, brother, doctor, agent, a one-night stand, a gospel choir, a sympathetic supporter, Harriet Tubman, James Baldwin, Whitney Houston…

Brilliantly led by Kyle Ramar Freeman, all seven actors sing, dance, grind their hips, shake their butts, flap their wrists, mince, punch and pose with savage deliberation and edgy humor, pointedly recycling every conventional caricature of black people and gay people and streetsmart wiseacres. And if you think that sentence runs on, you should hear some of Usher’s angry, diffident speeches.

Amidst the obscene language, camp and racist behavior, fear and vulnerability, dance plays a sly supporting role. Stephen Brackett’s direction and Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography guarantee that the action flows seamlessly despite its illogical sequence. Each time the “thoughts” switch character, their bodies and gestures transform familiar stereotypes into deft social satire, writing their own unmistakable commentary.

The whole filthy, hilarious mashup points accusatory fingers in all directions, expanding common attitudes into outrageous cartoons for emphasis. Only Usher asks any questions, and they lead to a sobering conclusion. 

La Cage aux Folles provided Broadway with its first homosexual musical. Set in a drag-queen nightclub, complete with a fabulously sequined chorus of transvestites, it handed a proud anthem, “I Am What I Am,” to a community struggling for recognition. However, Usher ends this show asking, “Will I be OK, or will all of this just keep going on for ever and ever?” He finally declares, “I’m stuck with who I am,” as if gay black men have made no progress toward acceptance, either privately or publicly, in 40 years.

Dr. Semmelweis is a different study of thwarted progress, a straight play (no pun intended) by Stephen Brown with Mark Rylance, who takes the title role. Deadly serious, the play tells a horrifying tale of medical history. And tells it and tells it, frantically repeating the ghastly details of women dying in childbirth and of one doctor’s frustrated attempts to prevent such deaths, tragedies that were themselves constantly repeated.

In 1847, while employed by Vienna’s distinguished General Hospital, the Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis tried to change his profession. He  insisted that fewer women would die of puerperal fever, or childbed fever, if the doctors attending them would wash their hands in disinfectant. Despite published evidence supporting his suggestion, the medical establishment rejected it scornfully, so women continued to die.

Almost alone, Rylance lifts the narrative from hectoring polemic to touching personal drama. Remarkable in his subtlety, he combines a scientist’s objectivity with an eccentric obsessive’s intransigence, infecting the entire cast with the force of his conviction.

The emotional extremes of these circumstances assume physical form in Antonia Franceschi’s vivid choreography, which shadows the action with a ghostly counterpoint. Equally confident in classical ballet and the harsher modern vocabulary, the dancers evoke the infected women, contracting in agony, and the nearly fanatical determination that drives Semmelweis into delirium.

Elusive as dreams, they become mourning mothers, cradling their lost children, and sylphs, impervious to pain but partnered by death, in a Romantic ballet. As corpses reviving under Semmelweis’s dissecting knife, they embrace him in the vise of his failure to save them.

Their silent presence puts haunting flesh on the play’s didactic bones, serving the story more effectively than the words that relate it and breathing life into terminal patients and aborted ideas as the dedicated doctor never could.

A Strange Loop until September 9.    barbican.org.uk 

Dr. Semmelweis until October 7.  nationaltheatre.org.uk