Bristol Old Vic Show Programme: Dr Semmelweis

by Stephen Brown with Mark Rylance

Photo Philip Vile

Welcome

Some of you have told us that Sir Mark Rylance is one of the greatest theatrical artists of our age. He does things few would dare to attempt with a skill which even fewer dare to dream of. Having the chance to introduce him to one of the truly great performance spaces in the history of British theatre, and a venue so loved by artists and audiences alike for over 250 years is, frankly, the mother of all buzzes.

Daniel Day Lewis said this theatre was the most beautiful in the country. David Garrick said it was the most exquisitely designed in Europe. Peter O’Toole dubbed it the loveliest theatre in the world. But it’s not its beauty that interests us now. Intimacy, which magnifies each detail of the performance in a unique collaborative shiver between actor and audience, is the thing you are about to experience in the hands of a true virtuoso. And around Mark we have assembled an ensemble of delicious skill: actors, dancers and musicians to rival those who have performed here over 250 years.

To meet them playing this space is like watching Nicola Benedetti picking up a newly rediscovered Stradivarius violin or Mo Salah walking the turf of Anfield for the first time.

But of course, none of this means a thing without you. The beauty of theatre is that all its meaning is created by you as you watch and listen.

If this theatre is a violin, then you are the strings. If it’s a football stadium, you are the roar of the crowd that sings “You’ll never walk alone.”

So thank you for all the dreams you have had in the past, and all those you will have here in the future.

And thank you for coming back today.

Tom Morris Artistic Director Charlotte Geeves Executive Director

There are moments when running this very special theatre feels like the most exciting job in the world.

Director’s Note

What is a radical?

The starting point of this project was a story Mark Rylance told me about a brilliant radical, rejected by the mainstream, whose revolutionary discoveries were overlooked for decades after his death.

But as we talked and read, delving deeper into the complexities of and around the text, we found questions that resonated with the complex and contradictory world we live in now.

Why are so many brilliant people outsiders? What combination of vanity and empathy drives the pioneers in medicine or indeed any field? What kind of mind can make the leaps of thought necessary to overturn injustice in the foundations of society? Is a revolutionary insight more likely to occur in the heat of the night or the cool of the day that follows?

I thought about this when helping my six-year-old daughter with her homework – a book celebrating Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb. But of course Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb. He just improved it, patented it and marketed it and the world bought his story. Would Semmelweis’ life have been happier if he’d been a better communicator? And what do his battles have to do with us, as we emerge, bleary-eyed from the feverish night of a pandemic which has both shattered our world view and dazzled us with the possibility of change? Where are the radicals who are making change possible now? Are they toppling statues, glueing themselves to motorways, or lost in the backrooms of universities and hospitals where their discoveries will remain ineffective for another 40 or 50 years?

Meanwhile, in a workshop at the National Theatre Studio, Mark wanted to push theatrical form in order to explore Semmelweis’ story. His vision is startling, vivid and sometimes contradictory, but you have the feeling that while he works he is sensing new possibilities of truth under his very fingertips. With the help of writer Stephen Brown, choreographer Antonia Franceschi and composer Adrian Sutton and a company of extraordinary skill, we have set out to find a way to convey the disturbed creative mind on stage; as well as represent the structural injustices and idiocies of the world in which Semmelweis lived and worked.

We created this show in the grip of a public health emergency, with waves of rehearsal room absence and the daily threat of closure. As a result, and perhaps also because of the troubled context, the process of developing Dr Semmelweis has been highly collaborative and truly experimental; with risk-taking and trust more valuable than ever to those of us for whom the value of theatre is it’s community and collaboration.

As I write, I don’t know where our research will take us. Inspired and challenged by Semmelweis’ story, members of the cast have been eloquent in illuminating the ways in which even today the female body remains subject to a fragile and incomplete system of scientific enquiry, all too often framed around the myth of a wild lone male genius. Will that sensibility be felt by the audience watching our show as we have felt it in creating it? We don’t know.

The greatest soliloquy writer of all challenged theatre makers “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature” and it is surely true that any live collaborative act of storytelling cannot help but reflect the concerns of the age and society in

which the story is forged. The play you will watch this evening is our collective response to Semmelweis’ story and the world we live in now, inspired by the talent and vision of a brilliant theatre artist.

It is both the story of a wild outsider battling against his world, and a reflection on what seems to me to be the greatest need in our society now: to balance incisive vision with patience, kindness and the capacity to listen.

Tom Morris

Tom Morris and Jackie Clune in rehearsal.

By Mal Rogers

of an idea Germ

Although he saved thousands of lives through his pioneering discoveries, the 19th-century doctor Ignaz Semmelweis remains virtually unknown outside scientific circles. That’s all about to change.

I’m chatting to Mark Rylance over Zoom, one morning just before Christmas. It’s breakfast time, we’re both still in our dressing gowns, but Mark is loquacious, courteous and charming.

“I’m not very good in conversation,” he says, somewhat surprisingly, “My voice is quite gentle, and I find it quite difficult to know when to say things. I think it might be something you learn instinctively up to the age of six; you learn things about conversation that I didn’t.”

He was shy as a child, barely speaking until aged six. “I spent those years just listening and watching, and I’m still doing that. I think it’s helpful for an actor to do that, to be listening as much as possible.”

Listening, and also reading. And the more he read about a certain Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarianborn doctor working in 19th-century Vienna, he felt that the doctor had quite the story.

In a biography by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Mark learned of the doctor’s innovative approach to medical hygiene: basically, wash your hands before performing surgical operations. A mammoth struggle to persuade the medical profession to adopt this revolutionary regime was to follow.

“When we think of good health practice, we think of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister,” says Mark.”Why not Semmelweis? He saved thousands of women from dying needlessly in childbirth. At the time, nine out of ten people were dying in operations.”

Semmelweis worked out why this was happening, and alerted the medical authorities. His work in preventing the spread of bacteria and germs of any sort foreshadowed the work of Pasteur and Lister, who would later acknowledge his inspirational efforts forty years later.

So, job done. You’d think.

However, until the late-1800s, doctors regarded hand-washing as a needless burden. If you’d just dissected a cadaver in the morgue, and were now hurrying to the maternity ward to deliver a baby, surely the last thing you needed was to waste time messing about with soap and water.

Consequently, maternity wards in the late-1800s resembled charnel houses. Naturally, poorer women fared the worst. They tended to be the patients of student doctors who would learn their craft cutting up dead bodies, then go straight to the maternity ward to pick up a little more knowledge. Dirty hands, dirty instruments, infected wounds: nobody made the connection until Semmelweis came along.

But in order to accept his ideas on hygiene, doctors would have been forced to admit they’d been killing women on an industrial scale, albeit unwittingly.

“Semmelweis was right, of course,” says Mark. “The doctors were unconscious killers. But he made

it very difficult for them to accept what he’s saying, mainly because of his anger and his relative inability to express himself; Semmelweis was never totally comfortable with Austrian German. He had difficulty even speaking Hungarian, apparently. . .”

In the 19th century what Semmelweis and his contemporaries were facing was nothing less than a pandemic. It’s hard to imagine a more apposite theme for a production at the cusp of theatre’s gradual re-emergence from lockdown.

In 2016, Mark Rylance sat down with Tom Morris, artistic director of Bristol Old Vic, to discuss a play on the subject

“Tom’s an old friend of mine, and since he’s been in Bristol I’ve come down more often,” says Mark. “I love the Bristol Old Vic, the auditorium in particular. It’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to play, ever since I first saw it.

The first day of rehearsals just reminded me that there’s nothing like the sense of community that you get in the theatre: with other actors, and with the audience. Being in the same room together with people, imagining the story; there’s nothing else comes anywhere near that feeling.

“In a theatre production, everyone is working on one thing, which is to be here now. As deeply and joyfully and as fully as you can. And that’s what the theatre is; that’s what everyone on stage is going to be trying to do. And that’s what the audience have come to do too: to be here now.”

Mark Rylance. Photo by Geraint Lewis

An Uncommon Genius

“Reason is but a tiny power in this world of ours, for it required no less than forty years for the best minds to admit, and at last to act upon, Semmelweis’s discovery.

This infamous episode in the history of medicine is the subject of novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s semi-fictional evocation. It is the passionate account of a man persecuted for the simple fact of revealing the truth.

Obstetrics and Surgery spurned with an almost unanimous outburst, and with hatred, this great step forward they had been invited to take.

They preferred, out of a bizarre touchiness, to remain in their swamps of purulent stupidity, and continue their game of gambling with death.

And, moreover, it would not be through Semmelweis that this great and urgent service would triumph (precious, at least, if one may take at face value the cares men seem to take to avoid suffering and to live life pleasantly).

It is even reasonable to maintain that if Pasteur had not appeared to destroy the cult of “sufficient theories”, in medical matters, if he had not fought them with realities too minute to be refuted by

simple lies, no real progress would ever have been made, whether in surgery or obstetrics, in spite of the efforts of a few isolated men of great talent like Michaelis and Tarnier.

There is nothing but war in the hearts of men.”

Extract from Semmelweis by Louis-Ferdinand Céline Published by Atlas Press, ©Éditions Gallimard, 1952

“I think with the greatest admiration of him and his achievement and it fills me with joy that at last he is given the respect due to him.”

JOSEPH LISTER, the father of modern antisepsis

“If it were discovered that the truths of geometry might annoy men, they would have been declared false a long time ago.”

JOHN STUART MILL

Image Copper Play engraving by Jeno Doby

In Rehearsal: Covid style

Photos Geraint Lewis

The Design ofDr Semmelweis

By Ti Green

Tom and I started work on Dr. Semmelweis before there was any mention of a new virus circulating in Wuhan. It invited us to imagine a world in which disease and the possibility of imminent death stalked everyday life. As I engaged in researching hospitals in midnineteenth century continental Europe, the world changed around us and the play developed an uncanny resonance with our Covid world in which we all sought to dodge infection and become experts in the transmission of disease.

By contrast, Dr Semmelweis was working in a world that hadn’t yet identified bacteria or viruses. The shocking rate of post-partum deaths in the doctors’ ward of the Vienna General Hospital was unexplained. The intensity of his focus on discovering patterns in the patient data, and the remorseless precision with which he applied his insights, became central in my thinking about the design.

It was important to place his story visually in the mid nineteenth century, because the social context in which he operated was so much a part of his struggle. I wanted to conjure the industrial revolution when cities grew at unprecedented speed, and when scientific progress was visibly

expressed in new architectural styles which took advantage of mass production techniques using cast iron, steel and glass. I was struck by the architectural scale of the institutional architecture of the time, and by how it expressed a system in which women and unconventional thinking would struggle to be heard.

I took this architecture and used it to explore the interior experience of being Dr. Semmelweis. The full depth of the Bristol Old Vic stage offers us an unconscious chasm from which the Mothers emerge. The architectural elements, from the oculus above to the metallic revolve underfoot, give form to the singularity of his focus and the remorseless light he cast on the evidence which finally enabled his great conceptual leap. I hope it also suggests the self-absorption that made it so hard for him to tolerate other voices in the conversation - his brilliance and his weakness being different sides of the same coin.

Invisible mothers,

&invisible monsters:

the journey to modern maternity medicine

By Dr Elinor Cleghorn

On the night of 30th August 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to Mary, her second daughter. Mary became the legendary Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, published in 1818 when she was twenty years old. Sadly, Wollstonecraft would never read her daughter’s words. 12 days after Mary’s birth, Wollstonecraft died, aged 38, of puerperal or ‘childbed’ fever. Mary was born healthy and well at home with the assistance of a midwife from Westminster Lying-In Hospital. But by the early hours of the next morning, Wollstonecraft had not delivered her placenta. Dr Poignard, accoucheur or ‘manmidwife’, was called for. After a long and difficult procedure, Poignand finally managed, by hand, to extract the placenta. Soon Wollstonecraft’s body began to tremble, her teeth to chatter. Before long the fever set in, and despite the efforts of several physicians, nothing could be done. No-one could have connected Wollstonecraft’s death to infection with Group A streptococcus bacteria; she died 50 years before Ignaz Semmelweis linked the cause of puerperal fever to the transfer of “cadaveric particles” from physicians’ hands to women’s vulnerable bodies.

By the late 1700s, puerperal fever had reached epidemic proportions in London, with the most devastating outbreaks in the lying-in hospitals where poorer women were attended by surgeonaccoucheurs. With male physicians increasingly adopting the historically women-led domain of childbirth, the causes of puerperal fever began to be debated. Many thought it resulted from inflammation related to the trauma of labour; some believed it originated from ‘putrid’ matter circulating in the air. While knowledge about puerperal fever was limited to the era’s diseasecausing theories, understanding was mired by

ingrained misbeliefs about the defective and deficient nature of women’s bodies and minds. According to some 18th century accoucheurs, puerperal fever was exacerbated not only by the inferiority of female bodies, but by the unknowingness and disobedience of women. For accoucheur Nathanial Hulme, women’s tendency to ‘corrupt’ their blood during pregnancy, by failing to police their behaviours, emotions, thoughts and diets, greatly predisposed them to puerperal fever. Hulme also placed responsibility with nurses and female midwives, whom he accused of being oblivious to the existence of this affliction. Writing in 1772, it was Hulme who was oblivious to the role hospital physicians like him played in rousing this “fierce and untamed enemy.”

Puerperal fever was named in the 18th century, but the mortal threat of child-bed fevers had been documented since the beginnings of modern medicine. Wollstonecraft was one of thousands of women, the majority unnamed and unknown, whose lives were cruelly claimed by an infection that we now know is preventable. Her story illuminates how the sexism and ignorance of the male-dominated medical establishment hindered insight into puerperal fever. Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) famously defended women against assumptions that their bodies and minds were fragile, unstable, and pathologically unsuited to anything but domestic lives. She understood that women were weakened by society’s – and medicine’s – insistence on their submission, and their silence. Imagine how many lives would have been saved, in childbirth and beyond, if male physicians throughout history had afforded women a voice.

Thanks to advances in medical knowledge, and pioneering figures like Semmelweis, maternal mortality from postpartum infection has reduced significantly. Yet women across the globe continue to lose their lives during and following childbirth to preventable causes and complications. History shows us that so much unnecessary suffering and death can be mitigated by listening to women, trusting their knowledge about their bodies, and respecting their wishes and needs. When we deny women their agency and autonomy, we are haunted by those thousands of women pushed to the margins of medicine’s

history. But by honouring lives lost to puerperal fever, one of medicine’s many historic failings of women, we can move beyond the mistakes of the past towards a safer, equitable, and more compassionate medical future.

Dr Elinor Cleghorn is a cultural historian specialising in histories of women’s bodies and health. She is the author of Unwell Women: A Journey through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World (W&N, 2021)

Costume Design drawings for The Mothers in Dr Semmelweis

Mark Rylance

Mark Rylance’s career has so far earned him an Academy Award®, three Tony Awards®, two Olivier Awards, three BAFTAs and one SAG Award.

Rylance was the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London for 10 years (1996-2006). In 2018, he returned to The Globe to play Iago in Othello, directed by Claire van Kampen and

previously in 2015, to play King Philippe V in Farinelli and the King, written by van Kampen, which then moved to the West End, garnering six Olivier Award nominations, before the play moved to Broadway.

Recently announced was the return of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem to London’s West End, with Rylance once again playing the lead role as Johnny Rooster Byron from April 2022.

Additional theatre roles include: Ron in Nice Fish, which he also co-wrote with Louis Jenkins; Countess Olivia in Twelfth Night; Richard III; Valere in La Bete and Robert in Boeing-Boeing. He won Best Actor Tony Awards® for Twelfth Night, Jerusalem and Boeing-Boeing; Best Actor Olivier Awards for Jerusalem and Much Ado About Nothing. Throughout his career, he has acted in more than 50 productions by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Rylance shot to worldwide fame with his foray into major films and TV, most notably his Oscar® and BAFTA-winning performance as Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies and the criticallyacclaimed Wolf Hall, directed by Peter Kosminsky. His portrayal of Thomas Cromwell garnered a BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor, Limited Series or Movie and an Emmy® nomination.

Other film credits include: Dunkirk, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The BFG, and Ready Player One. His latest roles in Terence Malick’s The Last Planet, Craig Roberts’ The Phantom of The Open and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up!, are to be released later in the year or 2022. He recently finished filming in Graham Moore’s The Outfit, and Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All

Cast biographies

Roseanna Anderson

Roseanna is a dancer, choreographer and director, working as an independent artist and co-director of Impermanence, since 2011. Films include: Lady Blackshirt (BOV/ Sydney Opera House) Empty Stage (Birmingham Royal Ballet) The Ballet of The Nations (Best Art Film, NRF Festival); Blast (BBC, Best Dance Film, Aesthetica Film Festival); Park Wanderings (Southwark Park Galleries). Stage includes: Baal (BOV, The Place, Jakarta Theatre Platform); Sexbox (British Council Edinburgh Showcase 2017); Da Da Darling (Guardian’s top 10 dance productions 2015); The Major Arcana (Mayfest 2022). Independent work as a choreographer includes BBC film - ELVER, a revival of Charles Stanford’s opera The Travelling Companion, and movement direction for Kings Cross (REMIX) & Haunted Existence.

Joshua Ben-Tovim

Joshua is a dancer, choreographer and director, working independently as well as part of Impermanence which he has CoDirected with Roseanna Anderson since 2011. Films include: Lady Blackshirt (Bristol Old Vic / Sydney Opera House) Empty Stage (Birmingham Royal Ballet) The Ballet of The Nations (Best Art Film, New Renaissance Film Festival); Feral (London Symphony Orchestra); Blast (BBC Arts); and Park Wanderings (Southwark Park Galleries). Work for the stage includes: Baal (Bristol Old Vic, The Place, Jakarta Theatre Platform); Sexbox (British Council Edinburgh Showcase); Da Da Darling (Listed as one of The Guardian’s top 10 dance productions) and The Major Arcana (Mayfest 2022).

Megan May Cameron

Megan trained at The Royal Ballet School and Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary dance. She has performed in the Thursford Christmas Spectacular (the biggest Christmas show in Europe) and UK and international tours of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. as Hungarian Princess and principal cover role of the Queen.

Haim Choi

German-born South Korean violinist Haim studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Royal College of Music, as an Orpheus Scholar. As a passionate chamber musician, she performs with the Salomé Quartet as their 1st violinist, and enjoys collaborating with like-minded musicians and ensembles of all sizes, performing a broad range of repertoire across the UK and Europe. Haim also performs regularly with the London Symphony, BBC Symphony, BBC NOW, Philharmonia, Sinfonia Cymru, Glyndebourne Tour Opera and English Touring Opera Orchestras. Haim was appointed Cultural Ambassador of UNESCO Korea, and enjoys teaching at the Yehudi Menuhin School, her alma mater, as well as Eton College.

Theatre includes: [BLANK], Measure for Measure (Donmar), Phyllida Lloyd’s allfemale Shakespeare Trilogy – Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest (St Ann’s NYC transfer); Utility (Orange Tree); Candide (Chocolate Factory), Fallen Angels (Salisbury) 9 to 5 The Musical, Billy Elliot, mamma Mia! (International Tour), Mogadishu (Lyric Hammersmith). Television includes: Mandy (Series 1&2), Motherland (Series 1,2 & 3), Borderline (series 1&2), Stephen, Three Girls, Ghosts, Father Brown, Eastenders. Jackie is also a stand-up comedian and the author of four books.

Megumi Eda

Megumi Eda left Japan at 16 when she was invited to join the Hamburg Ballet School. For the next 15 years, as a member of the Hamburg Ballet, the Dutch National Ballet and the Rambert Dance Company, she worked with choreographers including John Neumeier, Christopher Bruce, Jiri Kylian, William Forsythe, Twyla Tharp and David Dawson. In 2004, she moved to New York as a founding member of Armitage Gone! Dance. She has also collaborated with Yoshiko Chuma since 2014 as a Performer/Filmmaker. She won a Bessie Award (NYC Dance & Performance Awards) in 2004 and was named one of Dance Magazine’s BEST PERFORMERS, 2015. Most recently, her new film Endless Correspondences was officially selected for the Pool 21 International Film Festival.

Sandy Grierson

Theatre includes: As You Like It, Measure for Measure, Dido Queen of Carthage, Doctor Faustus, Comedy of Errors, The Tempest (RSC); Pity (Royal Court); Charlie Sonata (Lyceum); Lanark (Citizens); Anything That Gives Off Light (T.E.A.M./ N.T.S.), The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler (Vanishing Point/N.T.S.); Dunsinane, Home (N.T.S.); Subway, Lost Ones, Mancub, (Vanishing Point); Tonight Sandy Grierson Will Lecture, Box and Dance (Greyscale); Oresteia, Witkacy: Idiota, Mr Pinocchio (Lazzi); Fergus Lamont (Communicado); Dybbuk, Little Requiem for Kantor, The Night of the Great Season (Ariel Teatr); Satire of the Fourth Estate (Wildcat). Film and TV include: Murder Island, Victoria and Abdul, Legit, Night People.

Jackie Clune

Suzy Halstead

Suzy attended Northern Ballet School, Manchester gaining a diploma in Theatre Dance in 2011 and a scholarship to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (formerly RSAMD, Glasgow). Suzy joined Scottish Ballet for their winter season of Nutcracker and then moved on to Ballet Ireland in Dublin, touring with Swan Lake. In Musical Theatre, Suzy worked extensively with LWT’s Phantom of the Opera and then on to cruise ships which allowed her to focus on her jazz and commercial dancing.

Felix Hayes

For Bristol Old Vic: Cyrano, A Christmas Carol, Jane Eyre, A Monster Calls (The Old Vic in association with Bristol Old Vic). Other theatre credits include: Vice Versa, The Tempest, Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, City Madam, Cardenio (RSC); Peter Pan, Jane Eyre (National Theatre/Bristol Old Vic); One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Adventures of Pinocchio, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, A Christmas Carol (Tobacco Factory Theatres); Romeo and Juliet (Rose Theatre Kingston); Winter Solstice (ATC tour); The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo’s Child (Tall Stories); The Unsinkable Clerk, The Pickled King (Network of Stuff). Television includes: Extinction, Three Girls, A Gert Lush Christmas Special, Drunk Histories, Friday Night Dinner and Roisin Conaty.

Coco Inman

Coco Is a London based British-Japanese violinist. She started her musical studies at Chetham’s School of Music and later a bachelor and masters at the Royal College of Music. Coco engages in a variety of styles and ensembles ranging from baroque to contemporary music. She is a founding member of the Hogarth Quartet, a classical string quartet performing on period instruments and authentic tuning. In 2020 she became a member of the UK’s first women and non-binary free form collective, Her Ensemble. She joined the European Union Youth Orchestra as a principal player working with conductors Marin Alsop and Vasily Petrenko, Coco also has worked with multiple orchestras including the LPO, ENO, Philharmonia and Manchester Camerata.

Enyi Okoronkwo

Theatre work includes Tartuffe (National Theatre); The Haystack (Hampstead Theatre); Noises Off (Lyric Hammersmith); The Model Appartment (Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath); The Cherry Orchard (Bristol Old Vic); Junkyard (Bristol Old Vic/Theatre Clwyd/ Rose, Kingston); Boy with Beer (King’s Head); Wonder.Land (National Theatre); and Arthur’s World (Bush Theatre). Film work includes: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Up On The Roof. Television work includes Giri/Haji (Netflix); I Hate You (Channel 4); Funny Girl (Sky); Extinction (Sky).

Theatre includes: Othello, The Lightning Child (Shakespeare’s Globe), Pinocchio, Everyman, Medea (National Theatre), Macbeth (Young Vic), Dr Dee (ENO and Manchester International Festival), Two Gentlemen of Verona (Royal & Derngate, Northampton), Cabaret (West End), Carousel (Chichester Festival Theatre). Dance includes: While You Were Here (Jonathan Goddard and Lily McLeish) Step Mother/ Step Father (Arthur Pita and HeadSpaceDance)

Les Enfant’s Terrible (Barbican/Royal Ballet) If Play is Play and Three and Four Quarters (HeadSpace Dance), Collapse, Nest and Please Be Seated (New Movement Collective), Witch Hunt (Bern Ballet), The Wind in the Willows (ROH2 and West End), The Most Incredible Thing (Sadler’s Wells, Austria and BBC4), Aida (ROH), Pleasures Progress, Ghosts, Anatomy of a Story-Teller (ROH2).

Shizuku Tatsuno

Shizuku Tatsuno is a Japanese cellist. She graduated from the Yehudi Menuhin School and completed her Undergraduate studies at the Royal College of Music in 2020, studying under Thomas Carroll and Raphael Wallfisch. She is currently in her second year of Postgraduate studies at the RCM as a Nord Anglia Education Scholar under Richard Lester, with a full scholarship. She is a member of Salomé Quartet, formed at the Royal College of Music in 2016.

They have performed worldwide in venues including Tel Aviv Opera House and the Wigmore Hall. She also composes for her band ‘BIG LOVE’ in Japan.

Thalissa’s television work includes Two Weeks To Live for Sky, Trigonometry for BBC, Too Close for ITV and for film, Take Down. Thalissa will also star in Ragdoll, a new crime series from AMC and Sid Gentle. Her theatre work includes Women Beware Women, Othello, The Broken Heart, The Changeling (Shakespeare’s Globe), Blood Wedding, Yerma (Young Vic), Julie (National Theatre), The Night Watch (Manchester Royal Exchange), BU21 (Theatre503), Electra (Old Vic).

Millie Thomas

Millie trained at Northern Ballet Academy in Leeds before graduating from Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary. During her time at Rambert she had the opportunity to perform alongside Rambert Company and work with choreographers such as Antonia Franceschi and Arielle Smith. Millie joined CaraBdanza in Madrid before returning to the UK as a freelance artist working in Scotland. Credits include: Katie Armstrong Projects; A Falling Ballet by Róisín O’Brien; Éowyn Emerald Dancers; and a Nathan Evans music video. In 2019 Millie joined Emergence, the postgraduate company of Joss Arnott Dance. She toured the UK with a triple bill of works by James Wilton, Wubkje Kuindersma and Joss Arnott.

Thalissa Teixeira

Clemmie Sveaas

Alan Williams

Alan Williams spent his youth with the Manchester Youth Theatre, most of the 1970s with Hull Truck Theatre, then most of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s in Canada, mostly doing theatre, mostly doing new plays. He was in the first ever productions of Linda Griffiths’ Darling Family, Morris Panych’s Vigil, Sarah Kane’s Crave and Warhorse, which is where he first met Tom Morris. His television credits include Luthor, The Crown, Chernobyl, and The Long Call Film credits include The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati, Among Giants, Grow Your Own and Peterloo.

Daniel York Loh

Theatre includes the RSC, National Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, Royal Court, Hampstead, Finborough, Gate, Edinburgh Traverse, Nuffield Southampton and most recently the European tour of LOVE by Alexander Zeldin (Odéon-Théatre de l’Europe) as well as extensively in Singapore and in the feature films The Beach, Scarborough and The Receptionist.

As a writer his plays include The Fu Manchu Complex (Ovalhouse) and Forgotten 遗忘. (Arcola/ Plymouth Theatre Royal) He is one of 21 “writers of colour” featured in the best-selling awardwinning essay collection The Good Immigrant. He is a founder member of Moongate Productions and associate artistic director of Chinese Arts Now.

Kasia Ziminska is a Polish violinist and violist curious in her approach to style and expression. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal College of Music, where she co-founded the Salomé Quartet. With chamber music at the heart of her work she plays with Ensemble Kopernikus whose first disc is due for release next year. Kasia is passionate about early music and classical improvisation as well as experimental contemporary music, collaborating with acclaimed groups such as PlusMinus and Distractfold Ensemble. She appears in concert halls worldwide, her performances broadcast on television and radio including BBC Radio 3, WQXR New York, and Classical Planet.

Kasia Ziminska

Creative Team

Stephen Brown Writer

Stephen Brown is a writer, dramaturg and translator. His work as writer includes: Occupational Hazards (Hampstead / BBC Radio 4), Does My Society Look Big in This? (Bristol Old Vic; with Tom Morris), Future Me (Theatre503 / TheatreFIRST, Oakland / Public Theater, New York / UK tour), Faster (BAC / Lyric Hammersmith / 59E59, New York / UK tour; devised with Filter Theatre), The Master and Margarita (BAC Scratch; Filter Theatre, with Tim Phillips and Marc Teitler), Elephant (BAC Scratch; devised with Filter Theatre). As dramaturg: This is My Room (Rose Lipman; Clod Ensemble / Manchester Collective), On the High Road (South Bank Centre / UK tour; Clod Ensemble), Placebo (The Place / UK tour; Clod Ensemble), King Lear (Bristol Old Vic), Salvage (Corn Exchange, Newbury / Laban Centre; Lost Dog). As translator: German Jerusalem, On the Rope, The Language of Birds, My Cyprus, The Princes’ Islands, Rilke’s Venice (all Haus Publishing).

Tom Morris Director

National Theatre since 2004. He was the Artistic Director of BAC from 1995 to 2004 and has worked widely as a journalist, broadcaster and freelance writer, producer and director.

At Bristol Old Vic he has directed many shows including Touching the Void and The Grinning Man (both Bristol and West End); Swallows & Amazons (Bristol, West End and UK tour); Juliet and Her Romeo, The Crucible, King Lear, Handel’s Messiah, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with Handspring Puppets).

Tom also adapted A Christmas Carol for Bristol Old Vic in 2018, co-wrote the lyrics for The Grinning Man, and adapted A Matter of Life and Death with Emma Rice for the National Theatre. For Kneehigh, he wrote Nights at the Circus and The Wooden Frock with Emma Rice. For BAC he wrote Ben Hur, Jason and the Argonauts and World Cup Final 1966, all with Carl Heap.

Festival of Visual Theatre, Sam Shepard Festival.

Tom was founding Chair of the JMK Trust, has served on the boards of Complicite & Punchdrunk, has honorary doctorates from UWE and Bristol University, and an OBE for services to Theatre.

Ti Green Set & Costume Designer

For Bristol Old Vic: Touching the Void (Bristol Old Vic/Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh/ Royal & Derngate/ Fuel, transferred to the West End November 2019); Tamburlaine (transferred to the Barbican); Paradise Lost; Comedy of Errors.

Tom Morris is Artistic Director of Bristol Old Vic and has been Associate Director of the

Other directing credits include: Breaking the Waves (Scottish Opera/Opera Ventures with Edinburgh International Festival); The Death of Klinghoffer (ENO & Metropolitan Opera); Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (National Theatre); War Horse (as co-director for National Theatre; 2011 Tony Award for Best Director);Disembodied, Newsnight: The Opera, Home, Passions, Unsung, Othello Music, Trio, All That Fall, all for BAC, where he also produced Jerry Springer: The Opera, BAC Opera, British

Recent work includes: Bartholemew Fair (Sam Wanamaker Theatre at The Globe); Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (Sevenages, Shanghai Culture Square and tour of China); Dido Queen of Carthage (RSC); What Shadows (Birmingham Rep/Edinburgh Lyceum/ The Park London); The Emperor (Young Vic/ HOME/TFANA New York);

The Government Inspector (Birmingham Rep and national tour); The Funfair and Romeo and Juliet (HOME, MTA winner for Best Design); Playing for Time (Sheffield Crucible); Bright Phoenix (Liverpool Everyman); A Christmas Carol (Birmingham Rep); Orlando (Manchester Royal Exchange); Henry VI parts I, II

and III (The Globe); Time and the Conways (Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh/ Dundee Rep, CATS nomination for Best Design); Unleashed (Barbican) and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Liverpool Playhouse).

Designs for the RSC: Richard III, Little Eagles, Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. For the National Theatre: Revenger’s Tragedy, The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder, The UN Inspector, Coram Boy (National Theatre/ Imperial Theatre New York, Tony nominations for Best Costume and Set Design).

Richard Howell Lighting Designer

Crucible); The Grinning Man, The Crucible, The Life And Times Of Fanny Hill (Bristol Old Vic); The Madness Of George III (Nottingham Playhouse); Project Polunin (Sadlers Wells); Cabaret (Gothenburg Opera); Breaking The Waves, Flight (Scottish Opera); Il Trittico, Madame Butterfly, La Fanciulla (Opera Holland Park); Madame Butterfly (Danish National Opera).

Adrian Sutton Music

premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in 2016 and featured Michael Morpurgo and Joanna Lumley reading the book onstage, accompanied by the RPO and singers. Other work for theatre includes Husbands & Sons, Rules for Living, Nation and The Revenger’s Tragedy a the National and Cyrano atBristol Old Vic. Orchestral works include A Fist Full of Fives, performed on BBC Radio 3 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and numerous chamber works.

Richard’s credits include: Tartuffe, Coriolanus (RSC); The Writer (Almeida); Aristocrats, Privacy (Donmar); I See You (Royal Court); All My Sons, Jekyll and Hyde (Old Vic, London); Pinter 5 & 6, Glengarry Glen Ross, Bad Jews, Killer Joe, The Homecoming, East Is East (West End); NW Trilogy (Kiln); Habeas Corpus, The Watsons (Menier); Breaking The Code, A Doll’s House, Little Shop of Horrors, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (Manchester Royal Exchange); Labyrinth (Hampstead Theatre); The Country Wife (Chichester, Minerva); The Wild Party (The Other Palace); Faustus, The Glass Menagerie (Headlong, Uk Tour); A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Wizard of Oz, Playing For Time (Sheffield

Adrian Sutton’s scores cross orchestral, chamber and electronic genres, and have featured in a number of multiple award-winning National Theatre productions: War Horse, Coram Boy, Angels in America and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, for which he received an Olivier Award in 2013. War Horse opened in multiple productions worldwide including Canada, the USA, Australia, Berlin, the Netherlands and China. His War Horse Suite, a 25-minute symphonic orchestral work derived from the score for the show, was premiered by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) in June 2010 and, along with a new commission Some See Us from the BBC Proms, featured as the centrepiece of a ‘War Horse Prom’ in the 2014 Proms season. His score for War Horse: The Story in Concert had its

Antonia Franceschi Choreographer

Antonia Franceschi is a Time Out Award Winner for achievement in dance. She is an alumnus of NYCB where she performed works created on her by Balanchine, Robbins, Martins and in London by Baldwin, McGregor, Clarke and Phillips among others. She produced four seasons of The New York Ballet Stars which performed at The Queen Elizabeth and Royal Festival Halls. The Soho Theatre performed her play, Up From The Waste. She directed POP8 for The Lion and Unicorn Theatre collaborating with Mark Baldwin, Zoe Martlew and Ballet Black. She’s choreographed extensively for UK and US companies and most recently made the duet, Liberandum for Joaquin deLuz, performed at Real Madrid and premiered Uncaged at Dancespace for

NYTB, music by Claire Van Kampen. Ms Franceschi formed her own dance company, AFD JustDance, which performed to sold out audiences at Valletta Opera House, Winchester Theatre, 92st Y, and MMAC.

She choreographed Othello directed by van Kampen for The Globe Theatre and is honored be working with Bristol Old Vic.

She is a guest on Women’s Hour as well as a contributor to the book Balanchine Then and Now.

Jon Nicholls

Sound Designer

Music / sound scores for theatre include: Hamlet (RSC); My Brilliant Friend Parts 1 & 2, East Is East, Manor, Spring Storm, Beyond the Horizon, The Holy Rosenbergs (National Theatre); Oleanna, Touching The Void, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Bakersfield Mist (West End); Breaking The Waves (Scottish Opera); The Mirror Crack’d (Wales Millennium Centre & NCPA Mumbai); Good Canary (directed by John Malkovich), Much Ado About Nothing, The Seven Pomegranate Seeds (Rose, Kingston); Bracken Moor, Mermaid (Shared Experience); The Master Builder, Richard III (Leeds Playhouse); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Sheffield Crucible); Pink Mist, Medea, Touching The Void (Bristol Old Vic); Wonderland, Our Country’s Good, The Duchess of Malfi (Nottingham Playhouse); Idomeneus, Dear Elizabeth (Gate); The Norman Conquests (Liverpool Playhouse), Copenhagen, Betrayal, A Midsummer Night’s

Dream, Driving Miss Daisy, Things We Do For Love, Betrayal, Christmas Eve, The Whale, The Mother, Trouble in Mind, Intimate Apparel, The Double (Theatre Royal Bath); Eden End, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, In Praise of Love (Northampton Royal and Derngate), Wipers (Curve); Blue Remembered Hills, Art, Silas Marner (Theatr Clwyd).

Screen: scores for numerous documentaries for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and Al Jazeera. VR: The Turning Forest, The Turning World (BBC VR).

He’s created music and sound design for over forty audio dramas and composed features, many for the BBC, including most recently: The Meaning Of Zong, Lanny, The Certificate, Henry IV Part 1, Ballad Of The Bet, Ballad Of The Blade, Ballad Of The Fix, Earthsea, Beloved (BBC Radio 3 & 4) and Hindu Times, The Mother Load, Black Diamonds And The Blue Brazil, Donald & Benoit (Scottish Sound Stage). As an independent radio producer he’s made Unicorns, Almost & Water Towers Of New York for Radio 3’s Drama on 3 and Between The Ears series.

Claire O’Reilly Associate Director

directing credits include Census Day (Mountview Academy, London 2021) Marie Antoinette (The Egg Theatre, Bath 2021) We Want You To Watch (Wardrobe Theatre 2019), and Home (Dublin Theatre Festival 2019). Associate credits include Straight To Video (Landmark, 2021). Assisting credits include Uncle Vanya (Sonia Friedman Productions, West End 2020) and Translations (Royal National Theatre 2019). Claire tutors in Mountview Academy London. She has a Masters in Drama Directing from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (2019) and is a graduate of Film and Theatre at Trinity College Dublin (2015). She is a former weather and children’s TV presenter and soap storyboard writer with RTÉ, where she is still occasionally a continuity announcer.

Victor Lirio

Assistant Director and Script Clerk

Claire is theatre director based in Dublin and London. She is a co-founder and director of the award-winning devising and new writing company MALAPROP Theatre, whose recent work includes Where Sat the Lovers (Dublin Fringe 2021), Before You Say Anything (Dublin Fringe 2020), and GULP (video piece 2020). Other

Victor Lirio recently directed the London premiere of Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter at The Turbine Theatre. UK theatre: Edward Allan Baker’s North of Providence and Dolores (live production broadcast, Bristol); Her Naked Skin (asst. director; Circomedia, Bristol); Snow Queen (asst. director; Redgrave Theatre, Bristol). New York theatre (selected): Cassandra Medley’s Coming Up for Air starring Tony Award winner Tonya Pinkins (Ensemble Studio Theatre); Warren Bodow’s Race Music (New York Times Critic’Choice); Cassandra Medley’s Noon Day Sun (Time Out New York Critic’s Choice) starring Emmy Award winner Ron Cephas Jones

(Audelco Award nomination, Best Dramatic Production of the Year), Yussef El Guindi’s Pilgrims Musa & Sheri in the New World (2012 Steinberg Award, Best New Play). At Miami Theater Center: Sarah Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy (mainstage) and Neil Labute’s The Mercy Seat (The SandBox Theatre). At Huntington Theatre, Long Season: A Musical (associate director; Boston, MA). Concerts: Tony and Olivier Award winner Lea Salonga (Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, PICC); Suites by Sondheim (Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center). Radio drama: Cassandra Medley’s Cell starring Condola Rashad (Playing on Air). He earned his MA in Directing from Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (Doris Dibden Prize).

“Movement is Life”

- Alan Kriegsman, Dance Critic Washington Post

Creating movement with these actors, dancers and musicians while Tom conducts, Adrian composes, and Stephen and Mark write is a dream.

Their collaboration, ideas and languages have informed the movement, shape and energy.

I tried to create several languages: heightened natural for the actors, while the dancers are pushed further than ballet and contemporary to embody the huge range of emotion the play asks: joy, grief, sorrow, empathy and hope for starters!

To work, I love Julio Horvath’s (the creator of Gyrotonics) principals, as it directs the body using breath circles and imagery. It’s important to see shapes and then what the shapes evoke, as well as unused space. Using this as a starting point, I centre their instruments and once warm, guide them and set them free to create.

The Mothers, a constant presence within the story, are embodied by the dancers and must represent hope, grief, joy, memory, rage, sorrow.

Our challenge was to address these states and explore the questions: How do these emotions show on the body? Where does sorrow start and how can it have a voice? How do overwhelming emotions manifest and where are they held? How do the women bear loss?

I then develop lots of material which can be assembled and built on as we play the play.

These are special artists I’ve been given.

Antonia Franceschi

Choreographer

In association with

Sonia Friedman Productions The National Theatre

SFP is an international production company responsible for some of the most successful theatre productions in London and New York.

Since 1990, SFP has developed, initiated and been lead producer of over 180 new productions and together the company has been responsible for winning a staggering 58 Olivier Awards, 34 Tonys and 2 BAFTAs.

In 2021, Sonia Friedman OBE was listed in Variety’s Power of Women and has been included as a Variety500 Honoree since 2017 In 2019, Friedman was awarded ‘Producer of the Year’ at the Stage Awards for a record breaking fourth time. In 2018, she was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2017 she was number one in ‘The Stage 100’, the first number one not to own or operate West End theatres and the first solo woman for almost 20 years.

Current productions: The Book of Mormon, (West End and UK & Europe tour); Dreamgirls (UK tour); Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (London, New York, Melbourne, San Francisco and Hamburg);Mean Girls (US tour) and The Shark is Broken (London).

Forthcoming productions include: Oklahoma! at the Young Vic Theatre; Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in Toronto and Tokyo; Funny Girl on Broadway and, in London, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Human Voice and Jerusalem.

TV productions include: Wolf Hall, Uncle Vanya, J’Ouvert (BBC), Walden and Anna X (Sky Arts) (Co-Producer), The Dresser, King Lear (Exec Producer) and Dennis Kelly’s Together (Producer) (BBC).

The National Theatre’s mission is to make world-class theatre, for everyone.

The NT creates and shares unforgettable stories with audiences across the UK and around the world. On its own stages, on tour, in schools, on cinema screens and streaming at home, it strives to be accessible, inclusive and sustainable.

The National Theatre empowers artists and craftspeople to make world-leading work, investing in talent and developing new productions with a wide range of theatre companies at its New Work Department. Our nation thrives on fresh talent and new ideas, so the National Theatre works with young people and teachers right across the UK through performance, writing and technical programmes to ignite the creativity of the next generation.

Together with communities, the NT creates ambitious works of participatory theatre in deep partnerships that unite theatres and local organisations – showing that nothing brings us together like theatre.

The National Theatre needs your support to shape a bright, creative future.

For more information, please visit nationaltheatre.org.uk

@NationalTheatre @NT_PressOffice

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