No wonder they smoke. With the stress of nuclear annihilation, the weight of the demise of your fellow man and the sheer psychical trauma of keeping up appearances is it any wonder that nearly all the characters in The Physicists smoke like troopers?
This is a play which casts an inquisitive gaze over morality in science with its relevance to power politics and which along with its probing of the condition of sanity poses questions to the viewer which are still relevant 50 years from the original Zurich performance. Whilst the questions have aged well the script hasn’t. At times the lapsing monologues yield up almost Victorian sounding phraseology and syntax. Beyond this it behaves as a Beckett-lite piece, aping the master of the avant-guard, but in a fashion which lacks the polish of that high priest. However, I am inclined to think that a modern English translation would better serve the original play’s needs.
The singular setting that the Drama Barn provides is well suited for the drawing room of Les Cerisiers sanatorium. The double doors of Newton and Einstein’s quarters at times allowed for a quasi-Scooby Doo effect which in the second half allowed for some comedy to transpire. When we arrive we are brought into a world of murderous psychiatric patients who seem intent on throttling their female attendants, who all are lady athletes of the less lady-like sports. This understandably brings the police unto the scene.
Inspector Voss, played by James Dixon, is essentially an everyman, someone who the audience can sympathise with, a man put in a position subservient to institutional power from his superiors and from the Matron Bohl. But before long the Nurse Ratched wannabe and the Targgart apprentice are swept to one side as the audience comes to delve into the absurdity of the sanatorium. First up is a Sadeian Newton, played by Harry Whitaker, with a relish for cruelty and manipulation of the rules as the play goes on to its denouement. He becomes more than a mere mad fop hurtling from sanity, insanity to lucidity. This is true for all the three male leads. Briefly enters Peter Marshall’s Einstein which is disturbing for the audience at first and which returning continues to provide the bass note of lingering madness in the trilogy, in a play concerned with the power of music to heal. Then late in the act enters Rory Hern as Mobius played as a tormented Rochester figure. Roughly with each behaving like the fractured id, super-ego and ego respectively of some demented genius. All this trauma goes on under the watchful gaze of the unsettling serene and professional, money minded Fraulein Doktor played by Helen Peatfield. The dialogue in the final act between these four is cathartic for the audience and you hope the characters.
There were also some intriguing attention to detail. The gaudy wig of Newton must have itched something tragic but it looks like the exact thing a madman imitating Sir Issac Newton would choose to wear. The table setting for dinner by the martial male attendants with the soup-spoons in the incorrect position above and left facing rather than beside the knife on the right showed in one neat flourish a transition from the affection filled female maids to the draconian guardsmen, from liberty to shackles.
There are moments which make for comedy, others for horror but the main feeling is one of pertinence for the post-soviet age of rampant capitalism yoking science to the money machine. Whilst the script might need revision for the twenty first century, the cast did a good job in posing questions which still need to be asked.