Rylance, Mark

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    Venice: A Creepy ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Reunion in ‘Bones and All’

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    In this cannibal romance, the director Luca Guadagnino reunites Timothée Chalamet with Michael Stuhlbarg under very different circumstances.VENICE — There is a message that social scientists and environmental watchdogs have been trying to convey in this newspaper for a while. But maybe you haven’t really been listening. Maybe it will take a different messenger to catch your attention.“I think societal collapse is in the air,” Timothée Chalamet said on Friday at the Venice Film Festival.Though you might expect Chalamet to issue a doomy quote like that while promoting “Dune,” in which his character presides over the destruction of an empire, the 26-year-old actor tossed it out during a news conference for “Bones and All,” a new film that reunites him with Luca Guadagnino, the director of Chalamet’s breakout vehicle “Call Me by Your Name.”But then again, discussing “Bones and All” can put a person in a more contemplative frame of mind: Though it’s a romance — Chalamet plays one of two drifters, traveling together across the Midwest in search of belonging — the movie is stark, lonely and more than a bit gory because our two lovers happen to be cannibals.(Maybe now you understand why this meaty film is coming out Thanksgiving week.)Adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis, “Bones and All” tracks Maren (“Waves” star Taylor Russell), an 18-year-old who has just transferred to a new high school where she tentatively befriends a classmate and then, somewhat less tentatively, bites down hard on the girl’s finger. Maren’s dad (André Holland) has been dreading this sort of thing, as she’s shown an inclination toward consuming human flesh ever since she was a child. So when her father speeds her out of town and abandons her in the middle of nowhere, Maren must finally seek guidance from her own kind.Fortunately, she can smell fellow cannibals, including Chalamet’s Lee, who she forges a tender romance with, and Mark Rylance, who plays a veteran cannibal with unnerving Harry Dean Stanton energy. There’s even a scene where Maren and Lee run into a cannibal drifter played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who was so sweet in “Call Me by Your Name” and here is something else entirely.“It was a delight, the idea that we could kind of summon Michael to be the perverted father after having been the loving father in ‘Call Me by Your Name,’” Guadagnino said at the news conference. But if people on social media are tempted to draw a link from “Bones and All” to another “Call Me by Your Name” actor — Armie Hammer, whose career fell apart when the star’s cannibalistic fantasies came to light and sexual assault allegations followed — Guadagnino would rather you didn’t.“The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is nonexistent, and it should be met with a shrug,” Guadagnino told Deadline last week. “I would prefer to talk about what the film has to say, rather than things that have nothing to do with it.”Social media was a hot topic at the film’s news conference: Though the film is set in the 1980s, one journalist felt that the outcast characters in “Bones and All” suffer society’s judgment in a way that could be likened to a modern-day pile-on.“To be young now, or to be young whenever — I can only speak for my generation — is to be intensely judged,” Chalamet said. “It was a relief to play characters that are wrestling with an internal dilemma absent the ability to go on Reddit or Twitter, Instagram or TikTok and figure out where they fit in.”Added his co-star Russell, “The hope is really that you can find your own compass within all of [social media], and that seems like a difficult task now.”Chalamet concurred. “I think it’s tough to be alive now,” he said before issuing his prediction of societal collapse. What made him so certain? “It smells like it,” he said, as Lee or Maren might.But Chalamet wasn’t totally without hope. He said “Bones and All” portrayed that disenfranchisement and tribelessness in a way that could prove helpful now.“Without being pretentious, that’s why hopefully these movies matter,” Chalamet said. “The role of the artist is to shine a light on what’s going on.” More

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      Mark Rylance on ‘Jerusalem’ and the Golf Comedy ‘Phantom of the Open’

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      One Tuesday afternoon last month, Mark Rylance was sitting in his London home, his face and body bearing the accouterments of Johnny (Rooster) Byron, the rowdy onetime daredevil he has been playing in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s “Jerusalem.”His mustache was long and feral; his bare arms stuck out of a sleeveless T-shirt, flaunting temporary tattoos. Despite the intimidating display, Rylance offered his assurance in a video interview that he was still very much his usual subdued self.“I’m not in character at the moment,” he said in his gentle speaking voice. “I’m still Mark at this time of day. He’s in there somewhere.”In a little while, Rylance would travel to the Apollo Theater, do some vocal warm-ups, play some volleyball in the empty seats with his co-stars, and spend another night in the wild and energetic guise of Rooster. The actor won Olivier and Tony Awards for the original West End and Broadway runs of “Jerusalem” just over a decade ago. Now 62, he has hardly lost a step in the revival: Reviewing the 2022 production for The New York Times, Matt Wolf wrote, “There’s mighty, and then there’s Mark Rylance in ‘Jerusalem,’ a performance so powerfully connected to its part that it feels almost superhuman.”This feat feels 180 degrees removed from the soft-spoken, introspective film characters that Rylance has played in recent years: his Oscar-winning turn as the Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel in Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies,” or Peter Isherwell, the bumbling tech billionaire from Adam McKay’s farce “Don’t Look Up.”“I’m still Mark at this time of day,” Rylance said. As for Rooster, the character he plays in “Jerusalem,” Rylance said, “He’s in there somewhere.” Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesRylance is once again in understated mode for the biographical comedy “The Phantom of the Open,” which Sony Pictures Classics will release June 3. He plays the golfer Maurice Flitcroft, a crane operator who slipped into a qualifying round of the 1976 British Open and proceeded to shoot an atrocious 121, making him an instant celebrity of sorts.Like the mercurial Flitcroft, Rylance enjoys defying audience expectations and slipping back and forth between roles at either end of the energy spectrum. As he explained, any character — whether easygoing or off-the-wall — could be an opportunity for new personal discoveries.“When I was younger, I was much more egotistically attached to concepts that would come up in my mind about how a character should be,” he said. “But now I know that there’s no bottom to the depth of insanity that will come up through me.”Rylance spoke further about his return to “Jerusalem,” the stark contrast between his stage and film roles and his performance in “The Phantom of the Open.” These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What has it been like to come back to “Jerusalem” after all these years?It’s a powerful event to be at the center of. The central dynamics of it have got stronger in society, the struggle between whatever you want to call it — order and chaos, machine and nature. Sometimes during rehearsals, I experienced feelings of resistance and doubt in myself.What got you past those feelings?Coming to my senses. I mean that literally: Stop thinking and smell the air. Taste whatever you’re tasting. Listen and look at the other actors. It immediately moves you into something much larger than your own fears or expectations. Doing long runs of plays, you can get into a rut of self-consciousness, and it feels like you’re in some kind of prison yard. But actually, when you come to your senses, the prison yard is open to the sky.The dynamism Rooster embodies — particularly compared to the inwardness of the film characters you’ve been playing lately — was that hard to conjure up again?It’s not a territory that I give myself license to explore very much, that kind of boldness of expression. He’s an exhausting but enjoyable character for me. I have to be quite careful with him. His appetite is strong. There’s a certain wrangling of him to the floor at the end of the show. “OK, calm down — it’s my turn again for a few hours.”Rylance in “Jerusalem” with, from left, Charlotte O’Leary, Mackenzie Crook, Kemi Awoderu and Ed Kear.Simon AnnandShould more actors revive the roles they played earlier in their careers?I’ve been lucky in my life to revive a number of parts. I played Hamlet at 16 in high school and then at 28 to 31 for the R.S.C. [Royal Shakespeare Company] and the A.R.T. [at Harvard], and then again at 40 at the Globe [Shakespeare’s Globe, where Rylance was artistic director]. Reviving parts was the normal practice for hundreds of years before filmed work came in. If we didn’t have film and television, Robert De Niro would probably be doing “Raging Bull” or “Taxi Driver” every five or 10 years, because people would want to see it again. Jimmy Stewart would be doing “It’s a Wonderful Life” every Christmas.Do you think of your film acting as a different undertaking than your stage acting, or are they one continuous thing to you?It all comes from the same place, of enjoying pretending to be someone you think is other than who you are. Eventually it’s all still you. It pulls different things out of me, things that are buried in the back of the drawer. Certainly, in the theater, I have a lot more access to a collective consciousness when I’m playing with an audience and it’s going well. You’re lifted into something larger than yourself. You don’t get it in film because the audience isn’t there.Have you been seeking out a specific type of character to play in the movies?I’m in the fortunate position to turn down roles, so I’m not completely a victim of fate. After a very explosive character like Rooster, I will be more interested in an implosive character like Cromwell in “Wolf Hall” or Abel in “Bridge of Spies.”Where would you place a character like Peter Isherwell from “Don’t Look Up”?I suppose the role in “Don’t Look Up” could have been either of those things. He might have been a much more expressive character like Elon Musk. But in the conversations with Adam, we were interested in his inability to communicate. There’s some kind of barrier between that kind of person and a true, intimate, satisfying connection with other human beings — or plants, animals, anything on the planet. He just didn’t know how to do that.“I was very much like Maurice,” Rylance said of the golfer Maurice Flitcroft, whom he plays in his new film. “I learned by watching television.”Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesDoes making a movie like that feel like playing a professional sport?It’s a bit like what you see in English football matches, the coach and the player who’s about to be substituted, having a quick word. “Watch out for him” or “Keep on the lefthand side.” That’s what it’s like on film. You’re suddenly joining a team who have already been playing for a while — Leonardo [DiCaprio] and Meryl [Streep], they were all quite tired. They’d been playing for months when I arrived for my 10 days.Was there a time in your career when you’d turned your back on film and TV acting entirely?There definitely was. When I came to New York for “Boeing-Boeing” on Broadway, I became friends with Fran McDormand and Joel Coen, and they auditioned me for “A Serious Man.” I was very enamored of the script and their films and really wanted to do it. When I didn’t get the part, I was surprised by how sad I was. It was an unusual feeling for me. I can picture myself now sitting in the cafe, thinking, oh, I really want this. So I pursued getting a New York agent and manager and started to go for auditions. And they were breathtakingly dull and bad things. Eventually, out of guilt, I took a film where I ended up lying on the floor, being beaten with a hammer, fish and chips being sicked up on my face, covered in blood. The director was on his Game Boy, 100 yards away, not even watching. And I quit.You were ready to walk away from screen acting entirely?All my career, I’ve been told by agents that unless I make time for film and TV, I’m not a serious actor. I thought, my favorite Kabuki actors and Kathakali actors, they don’t worry about film and television. I’ve got this fabulous theater career, I make a fine living at it, I have great parts. And I got rid of all these agents and decided I would never work in film again, unless someone really asked me and I had the time. I guess nature abhors a vacuum, because a few years after that, Spielberg asked me to be in “Bridge of Spies.”But no hard feelings about how “A Serious Man” turned out?Michael Stuhlbarg was wonderful in that role and the better actor for it, no doubt about it.What appealed to you about “The Phantom of the Open”?I’ve done a lot of comedies in the theater and enjoyed it. That was always a surprise to me, because I was very shy as a teenager and completely surprised when I got up and made people laugh. Even “Jerusalem,” tonight, there’ll be moments that I’ll think, why are they laughing? And it’ll take me a while to figure out what it is. This is one of the few comedies I’ve been asked to be a part of in film, with a lot of aspects of Don Quixote, jousting at windmills, believing his own identity, not being persuaded by other people’s perception of who he is. Not sociopathic or psychopathic, where he doesn’t even hear what other people are saying — there’s a dignity to Maurice, that he honors his own truth, and I loved that about it.Rylance in “The Phantom of the Open” as the quite bad amateur golfer Maurice Flitcroft.Nick Wall/Sony Pictures ClassicsDid playing a real-life figure interest you?I’m wary of playing very famous people. Even William Kunstler [whom he played in “The Trial of the Chicago 7”] is a bit on the edge of people really knowing him. The comments from some of the real-life Chicago Seven people, when they saw the film, and the nasty things they said about us trying to portray these characters, stung. I’ve been asked to play Truman and different people like that. The shoe is a bit too tight.Did you know anything about Maurice Flitcroft before making the movie?No. Fortunately, there’s a lot of wonderful YouTube stuff. His interviews are amazing, because you think, “You can’t be serious. You can’t really mean that. You must be brilliant at winding up reporters for a laugh.” But I’ve watched them hundreds of times and I can’t see a crack in the sincerity. I just have to play this guy sincere.Are you a golfer yourself?As kids, we would borrow our granddad’s golf clubs and make a golf course in his lawns in Kent. As we got to 15, 16, we would sometimes go to the local golf course on a Monday morning, when no one else was there, and play — very, very poorly and with no training. I was very much like Maurice. I learned by watching television.As we see in the film, Flitcroft gained a new level of recognition when he came to America. Did that feel familiar to you?Sometimes, the Americans have more appreciations for the English soul than the English. But there’s also a reverse thing — maybe we English have a deeper appreciation for American culture. I certainly learned more about American culture when I came to study at RADA [the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] in ’78 than I’d learned in America [where his family lived in the 1960s]. The young acting students were the ones who turned me on to Spencer Tracy, Bob Mitchum, Montgomery Clift, Jimmy Dean, Brando. Even Bob Dylan and Elvis, Frank Sinatra. All those people that my parents had loved to some degree — I hadn’t realized how deeply cultural and soulful they were until I was amongst young English actors saying, “Watch this, listen to this.”This makes me want to take a trip to England and learn what I’m missing about American culture.You could just take a day trip to New Jersey and get the same thing. More

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      ‘The Phantom of the Open’ Review: ‘The World’s Worst Golfer’ Wins Laughs

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      Inspired by Maurice Flitcroft’s stunningly bad results at the 1976 British Open, this comedy plays with a genre in which underdogs so often triumph.The British comedy “The Phantom of the Open” — about a working man’s dreams of golf glory — features a few dreamlike sequences that suggest the director, Craig Roberts, is a fan of the 1946 fantasy romance, “Stairway to Heaven,” especially when a tiny golfer circles a golf ball the size of the moon.Inspired by Maurice Flitcroft’s attempts to qualify for the British Open in 1976, this comedy is also the sort of good-hearted movie the director Frank Capra would have liked to have taken a swing at.The actor Mark Rylance brings a mix of sorrow and optimism to his portrayal of Flitcroft, the shipyard crane operator who, encouraged by his wife, Jean (Sally Hawkins), to finally follow his dreams, enters the British Open. The rub: Neither of them knows anything about golf.A different actor than Rylance might have revealed the slight darker, impostor wrinkles of the tale. Instead, his character, an unflummoxed optimist, shares some of the same cheery qualities as Ted Lasso.“Phantom” opens with Maurice nervously awaiting a television interview years after his first try at the Open. The scene plays with a genre in which underdogs so often triumph. Maurice, it turns out, is stunningly bad. Simon Farnaby based the screenplay on his and the sports journalist Scott Murray’s biography, “The Phantom of the Open: Maurice Flitcroft, The World’s Worst Golfer.”Maurice’s personal mantra is “practice is the road to perfection.” Even so, it may not get him there. His persistence will, however, aggravate golfing elites and mortify his stepson Michael (Jake Davies), who has been promoted by the shipyard higher-ups. The twins Christian and Jonah Lees bring a silly buoyancy to this already offbeat tale as Maurice and Jean’s championship, disco-dancing sons. (That, too, is based on fact.)The Phantom of the OpenRated PG-13 for some strong language and smoking. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Review: In ‘Jerusalem,’ a Once-in-a-Lifetime Performance, Again

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      Mark Rylance is back in a role that won him a Tony more than a decade ago. But this London production isn’t just coasting on past kudos.LONDON — There’s mighty, and then there’s Mark Rylance in “Jerusalem,” a performance so powerfully connected to its part that it feels almost superhuman. That’s as it should be for a play about a larger-than-life character named Johnny Byron, who demands an entirely fearless actor, and has one in Rylance.None of this will surprise those familiar with this play by Jez Butterworth, which premiered with Rylance in the lead role at the Royal Court here in 2009; two years later, it transferred to Broadway and won Rylance the second of three Tony Awards. In a thrilling revival that opened Thursday at the Apollo Theater (running through Aug. 7), everything feels enriched by time.Now 62, Rylance is considerably older than a man described in the text as “about 50.” But such is this actor’s boundless energy and enthusiasm that you can imagine him returning to the role again and again: Johnny defies all conventions, including those of age, and so does a wildly versatile actor who approaches this societal rebel as a kindred spirit.The creative team, headed by Ian Rickson, the most empathic of directors, is the same as it was in 2009. To this run’s credit, it is no museum piece coasting on past kudos, but a vital experience with a revitalizing effect. Standing ovations are commonplace here these days, but the one at Wednesday’s final preview possessed a singular fervor that had Rylance jumping up and down with childlike glee at the curtain call.In the show, Johnny, who goes by the nickname Rooster, walks with a halting gait that goes unexplained. Physical impediments, it seems, barely matter to this tattooed, barrel-chested reprobate, who performs a headstand within minutes of his arrival onstage. He then downs a mixture of vodka, milk and a raw egg, whose shell Rylance tosses into the audience. (On Wednesday, someone tossed the shell back, prompting a delicious double take from the star.)Johnny’s outsize gestures are those of a man whose defiantly reckless existence is under serious threat. While the rural community in which he lives is holding its annual spring fete to mark St. George’s Day, Johnny tenaciously stays at the beat-up trailer he has long called home. A magnet for a cross-section of local hangers-on, including a loquacious professor (a beautiful turn from Alan David) and underage female adolescents hungry for spliffs and sex, Johnny’s illegal encampment is soon to be bulldozed. His young son arrives for a visit, only to be whisked away by the child’s disapproving mother (a persuasive Indra Ové).From left, Charlotte O’Leary, Mark Rylance, Mackenzie Crook, Kemi Awoderu and Ed Kear in “Jerusalem.”Simon AnnandNot only is Johnny faced with a final order from government officials to move on, but he must confront the wrath of Troy Whitworth (a fearsome Barry Sloane), whose 15-year-old stepdaughter, Phaedra, has sought refuge with Johnny. Troy will go to violent lengths to claim her back.It’s Phaedra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) who opens the play, singing the English hymn that gives “Jerusalem” its title and whose lyricist, William Blake, is referenced during a game of Trivial Pursuit later on. Worthington-Cox delivers this most stirring of tunes in front of a drop curtain depicting the cross of St. George, England’s flag. But the play itself transcends nationality to speak to any disaffected outsider who won’t be easily silenced and who gathers acolytes like moths to an inextinguishable flame.I’ve now seen “Jerusalem” five times (including on Broadway), and Rickson’s current company — several of them holdovers, with Rylance — are as good as any predecessors, and sometimes better: Worthington-Cox is the most moving Phaedra I have experienced.Mackenzie Crook remains especially heartbreaking as Ginger, Johnny’s friend and ally whose haunted eyes convey a premonition that his buddy’s days are numbered. Jack Riddiford, a company newcomer, brings a boyish appeal to the role of Lee, who dreams of starting afresh in Australia but is thankful for the raucous good times that Johnny has made possible on home soil.You can imagine one or two of these characters as avid supporters of Brexit, though the idea didn’t exist when Butterworth wrote the play: The sweary abattoir-worker Davey (Ed Kear, another cast newcomer) doesn’t “see the point,” he says, of other countries, including neighboring Wales. British newspapers have been busily assessing “Jerusalem” as a defining state-of-the-nation commentary whose legacy and influence are incalculable. Butterworth has stayed out of the discussion, saying only that he revived the play so his young daughter, Bel, could see it.But such considerations are academic next to the visceral immediacy of a play that soars as high as the designer Ultz’s ravishing tree-filled set, which seems to sweep up beyond the theater’s roof. That vast reach is of a piece with a performance you might describe as once-in-a-lifetime, if it weren’t so evident that Rylance’s passion for this part, thank goodness, seems far from over yet.JerusalemThrough Aug. 7 at the Apollo Theater, London; jerusalemtheplay.co.uk. More

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      ‘The Outfit’ Review: The Violent Measure of a Man

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      In this gangster exercise set in 1956 Chicago, Mark Rylance plays a tailor who has very large scissors and some sharp moves.The gangsters in “The Outfit” have plenty of tough moves, but none of these guys hold the screen like Mark Rylance when he just stands or stares — or sews. His character, Leonard, is a bespoke tailor who once worked on Savile Row and now practices his trade in an unassuming shop in Chicago. There, he snips and stitches with a bowed head and delicate, precisely articulated movements that express the beauty and grace of Rylance’s art.Sometimes, all you need in a movie is a great actor — well, almost all. Certainly Rylance’s presence enriches “The Outfit,” a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense. It’s a nostalgia-infused genre exercise set in 1956 that centers on Leonard, who, having left London after the war, now makes suits for a clientele that includes underworld types, some of whom use his shop for business. Day after day, he works in his somber, claustrophobic store while dodgy types parade in and out, dropping envelopes in a locked box. Like the box, Leonard is a mystery that the movie teases out one hint at a time.Leonard takes longer to open, although the box’s contents are central to the puzzle that also involves a clandestine recording, a secret romance, rampaging rival crews and the larger mysterious criminal enterprise that gives the movie its title. There’s also Leonard’s employee, Mabel (Zoey Deutch), one of two women in the mix; Nikki Amuka-Bird also pops in as a glamorous villain. For the most part, Mabel is around to greet the customers and brighten up the store’s gloomy interior: She smiles at one villain (Dylan O’Brien), gives the cold shoulder to another (Johnny Flynn) and so on.The director Graham Moore and his screenwriting partner, Johnathan McClain, move their limited pieces around, spill the requisite blood and modestly complicate the proceedings. The story is self-aware, chatty and thin; it plays out as an extended cat-and-mouse, though who’s who in this particular duet shifts over time, if not all that surprisingly. Mostly, the movie seems like it was concocted by a couple of cinephiles who wanted to play with genre for genre’s sake. And why not? That’s as fine a reason as any to dust off some fedoras and hire actors of varying abilities for some retro American gangster cosplay on a British soundstage.“The Outfit” basically consists of characters moving in, out and through the store’s two main rooms, spatial limitations that can feel stagy and be tricky to manage. This is Moore’s feature directing debut (he wrote “The Imitation Game”) but, working with the director of photography Dick Pope, he handles the space thoughtfully. With a muted palette, shifts in the depth of field and complementary staging and camera moves, Moore and Pope map the store’s (and story’s) geography from different vantage points. And, in sync with Rylance’s finely calibrated performance, they insure Leonard remains the visual axis.Rylance put on a fright wig to play William Kunstler in “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and wore Mr. Ed-size choppers for his role as the eccentric zillionaire in “Don’t Look Up.” But he’s a master of restraint and he doesn’t need accessories to hold you as he proved with his mesmerizing turn in Steven Spielberg’s Cold War drama “Bridge of Spies.” Rylance’s role here isn’t as rich, but one of the attractions of “The Outfit” is that it allows him to etch his character in pockets of filigreed solitude. Leonard’s focused yet effortless meticulousness when he works — how his hands smooth the fabric and control his enormous shears — define this man more than any line of dialogue. You also get to see Rylance engaging with a worthy foil.That would be Simon Russell Beale, who plays Roy, a gangland boss. Roy enters about midway through the movie. By then, bullets have been fired and blood has splashed across the floor, developments that are nowhere as ominous or tense as watching Leonard and Roy have a polite little talk in the back. Beale has the more overtly showy role. But like Rylance, he builds his characters through meticulously orchestrated moderation — vocal and physical — that faint smile by smile, hushed word by word, shifts the very particles in the air. Together, Rylance and Beale create a little world and a movie within a movie that’s worth watching.The OutfitRated R for gun violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dr. Semmelweis’ and ‘The Glow’ Reviews: Tales From the Asylum

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      Two new plays offer very different experiences of the sanitarium, one starring Mark Rylance and the other spotlighting a fast-rising actress.LONDON — “Wash your hands! Wash your hands!” That plea has sounded the world over in recent years, and it lends a topical potency to “Dr. Semmelweis,” running through Feb. 19 at the Bristol Old Vic, a beautiful 18th-century playhouse in southwest England.Its urgent speaker is the titular medic, a Hungarian-born doctor in 19th-century Vienna who pioneered antisepsis only to die in 1865, at age 47. It was left to subsequent physicians like Joseph Lister to pick up his work.The play tells the time-honored tale of a man against the system, in this case a visionary whose desire to reverse a high mortality rate among young mothers comes up against a largely heedless establishment. Worthy of Ibsen and chronicled before in a Howard Sackler play that circled Broadway but never got there, Semmelweis’s story here emerges as a star vehicle for Mark Rylance. The much-laureled actor (three Tonys and an Oscar) co-wrote the play with Stephen Brown.The director, Tom Morris, runs the venerable Bristol venue and has given Semmelweis’s too-short life a busy, bustling production that includes actors spilling from Ti Green’s turntable set into the auditorium on occasion, with musicians and dancers on hand to amplify the discordant emotions of the piece. The dancers, choreographed by Antonia Franceschi, give swirling physical expression to Semmelweis’s increasingly disordered mind and to the mothers who lost their lives to hygienic neglect. The Salomé string quartet weaves among the events, playing snatches of Schubert and lending a high-art sheen to some grave subject matter.If all this sounds like a lot of embellishment, it’s fair to say that the first act in particular feels as if stage business is being used to disguise some fairly boilerplate writing. The play begins at the end, with Semmelweis in Hungary recalling, alongside his calm-seeming wife, Maria (Thalissa Teixeira), a climate of contamination in Vienna that did irreparable damage to the doctor’s psyche.How can a vaunted “city of new ideas” not be more responsive to the investigations of a young maverick who comes upon the disinfectant potential of chlorine? This grocer’s son has determined that death rates at the world’s largest hospital — as Vienna General then was — are three times higher at the doctors’ clinic than at that of the midwives. “Cadaveric particles” are posited as the culprit, passed on by unclean hands from the autopsy room to the delivery ward and turning the hospital into a de facto slaughterhouse.Rylance’s character in “Dr. Semmelweis” is, in time-honored fashion, a visionary whose desire to reverse a high mortality rate among young mothers comes up against a largely heedless establishment.Geraint LewisThe locals aren’t having it. “Nuts by name, nuts by nature,” one of Semmelweis’s colleagues remarks dismissively, referring to this upstart’s first name, Ignaz. Never mind that the insult doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given that these people were probably not speaking English.After the intermission, the baldfaced, expository nature of the writing continues. If Semmelweis is right, we’re told, “the entire future of medicine will be changed.” There’s a line, too, about the possible efficacy of bleach that draws thumping parallels to one of the more, um, peculiar proposals to defeat the current pandemic.Through it all, Rylance is a springy physical presence. He brings a stammering restlessness to the role of a radical thinker whose thoughts at times outpace his words. You have to smile when this protean actor — acclaimed across TV and film, but devoted first and foremost to the stage — speaks in passing about “not wanting to waste time in the theater either,” and it’s nice to find among the supporting cast such fellow theater stalwarts as Alan Williams, in stern form as the obstetrician Johann Klein, Semmelweis’s nemesis.More than anything, “Dr. Semmelweis” whets the appetite for Rylance’s return to the London stage in April, reprising his seismic performance in the Jez Butterworth play “Jerusalem,” first seen at the Royal Court in 2009. That same London address, an important one for new writing, is currently hosting an Alistair McDowall play, “The Glow,” that really is nuts, albeit intriguingly so.The title character of “Dr. Semmelweiss” died unappreciated in an asylum, and McDowall’s time-traveling drama begins in one two years earlier, with a dimly lit figure fearfully inhabiting a windowless cell. That figure, a woman (Ria Zmitrowicz), is then glimpsed in any number of settings and centuries, ranging from the 1300s, in the company of a warriorlike personage (Tadhg Murphy) who might have wandered in from “Game of Thrones,” to 343 A.D. and forward to the 1970s and beyond.From left, Ria Zmitrowicz and Rakie Ayola in “The Glow” at the Royal Court Theater in London.Manuel HarlanWhat in heaven’s name is going on? You might ask McDowall the same of his 2016 play for the Royal Court, “X,” which was set on Pluto.Shouty and apocalyptic only to turn rapturously poetic in its closing monologue, “The Glow” is best viewed as a sensory experience in which lighting and sound conjoin with the writer’s freewheeling imagination to summon up a lonely and difficult world that nonetheless allows for the warmth of the title. The intermission, only 40 minutes or so in, gives audiences ample time to ponder what they have seen.The more literal theatergoer will be driven to distraction by the play’s apparently willful opacity, but that in itself tracks with the experimental bent of a theater defined in part by the playwright Caryl Churchill, whose own inquisitiveness and disregard for convention may have offered a beacon for McDowall.For myself, I have to commend the full-throttle production of Vicky Featherstone, the Court’s artistic director, in tandem with a design team in which Jessica Hung Han Yun’s mercurial lighting reigns supreme. Fisayo Akinade and Rakie Ayola offer sterling support as more recognizable participants in a world to which Zmitrowicz’s initially mute woman has a hesitant relationship. Seen first as a spiritualist medium — yes, you read that right — Ayola also gets to display a lovely singing voice.With the mysterious spectral figure at the play’s center, McDowall has offered a gift to Zmitrowicz, a fast-rising actress who has come to attention of late largely at the Almeida. Alternately sullen and feverish, indrawn yet eloquent, this performer rivets our attention throughout, even when the play she inhabits is ricocheting every which way around her.Dr. Semmelweis. Directed by Tom Morris. Bristol Old Vic, through Feb. 19.The Glow. Directed by Vicky Featherstone. Royal Court Theater, through March 5. More