The vital alliance of theatre and science: why we need to look again at science as presented in theatre
- Arthur I. Miller
- Apr 6
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Arthur I. Miller
A few days after Tom Stoppard’s death on December 2nd, Michael Baum, a distinguished surgeon, wrote in a letter to The Times that Stoppard’s discussion of chaos theory in his play Arcadia had inspired him to discover a new and far more effective chemotherapy to treat breast cancer. Baum went on, ‘Stoppard never discovered how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.’
It’s an example that puts paid once and for all to the belief that science and theatre have nothing to do with each other.
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and Theatre About Science
I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between science and theatre. I knew Tom Stoppard and we had several illuminating conversations about art, science and theatre, which he recalled in a 1994 article entitled ‘Playing with Science’ for the journal Engineering and Science. He wrote, ‘Science and art are nowadays beyond being like each other. Sometimes they seem to be each other.’ I don’t think he would object to my replacing ‘art’ with ‘theatre’.
With a new production of Arcadia coming up at the Old Vic, Guillermo del Toro’s recent take on Frankenstein, on-going fears about AI and the rise of anti-vaccers like Robert Kennedy Jr, recent events make it more and more urgent for everyone to get to grips with science and - even more difficult - to get inside scientists’ heads.
New Frontiers
How better to do so than through plays about science? Theatre can enable a re-imagining, a way to read between the lines in, for example, a scientist’s correspondence. What were they getting at when they wrote some complicated hypothesis or published a crucial article? As Michael Frayn wrote, referring to his groundbreaking play Copenhagen, ‘Even when all external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists’ heads is through imagination.’
I’ve tried to do this myself in a play I wrote called Synchronicity, on the relationship between the analyst Carl Jung and the brilliant but troubled physicist Wolfgang Pauli, which enjoyed some success in readings in New York and had two runs at the White Bear Theatre in London and also at a recent international symposium on Theatre about Science in Coimbra, Portugal.
These days there are plenty of plays that take science as their theme. But how many actually contain scientific ideas? Most, in my experience, are merely celebrations of science or scientists, all well and good in their own right. But they don’t push scientific thought further, let alone catalyse a scientist’s thoughts. While Copenhagen tackles scientific ideas and moral issues around science, Oppenheimer contains very few actual scientific ideas and is primarily a celebration of one man’s persistence in the face of political adversity.
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen
In Copenhagen, the scientists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg together with Bohr’s wife Margrethe meet some time after their deaths. They are in a nether world, where Bohr and Margrethe forever try to puzzle out why Heisenberg visited them in Copenhagen in 1941, when the city was occupied by Nazis. Existing outside of space and time, the three circle each other like electrons around a nucleus, tossing ideas about, talking sometimes to each other, sometimes to themselves.
In the course of the play they discuss Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, nuclear physics, the making of the bomb and the morality of nuclear weapons. All the while Bohr is wondering what Heisenberg is really up to. Does he want to find out whether the allies are building a bomb or is he trying persuade Bohr to cooperate with the Germans? Frayn doesn’t shy away from presenting science as accurately as possible, while integrating it into a complex plot charged with intense human emotion.
Frayn has said that he used only the actual words spoken by the individuals themselves, but in reality no one took any notes. He relies on the published reminiscences and historical reconstructions of others to construct his plot.
Copenhagen was a resounding success, which amazed Frayn himself. But this success spurred historians of science to investigate Frayn’s historical reconstruction. It turns out that certain points in Frayn’s plot are actually open to question and a fierce debate ensued. Copenhagen remains significant for the moral issues it raised, based on a solid exposition of physics, and it certainly played an important role in increasing public awareness of science. The fact that it contains complex and difficult scientific discussions has not lessened its popularity.
Contrasting Attempts at Science and Theatre
In the case of the film Oppenheimer, the production team made a point of consulting scientists but in the end the science is more like window dressing. While the film has its share of physics, this is subsidiary to the human stories around the making of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the characters’ trials and tribulations. It’s a people story masquerading as a science story.
Productions about a scientist’s travails need not always suffer this fate. This sort of production can be intellectually satisfying when it conveys grand ideas. Berthold Brecht’s masterpiece The Life of Galileo is about Galileo’s epic struggle to gain acceptance of his conviction that the earth circles the sun, as implied by the empirical evidence of his telescope along with scientific reasoning. But this clashes with religious dogma which asserts that the earth is the centre of the universe, as stated in the Bible. As Galileo quipped in a celebrated letter of 1615, ‘The bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.’
In the end faced with the prospect of torture he recants and dies a broken man. Brecht presents these two conflicting viewpoints in the time frame of the 17th century and thus goes far beyond merely celebrating Galileo’s steadfastness.
Success in Theatre with Mathematics
Mathematics and theatre might seem to be an odd couple. After all mathematics is a subject that one would assume would be notoriously difficult to dramatise. Firstly the subject matter is abstruse. Secondly most people, not to mention many scientists, would be hard put to name even mathematicians who are famous today, let alone explain what they are famous for. However there is a certain fascination around mathematics and some great human stories.
The play A Disappearing Number is the story of the Indian mathematician and self-taught genius Srinivasa Ramanujan and the racism he suffers in early 20th century Cambridge. It is a human story with complex mathematics brilliantly woven in and vividly brought to life with highly original staging. The play bombards the senses with Indian music, dance and wildly colourful scenes that come and go in a flash, providing a kaleidoscope of colours and sounds that seem to reach to infinity, as did Ramanujan’s mind.
The theme is patterns, the number patterns that Ramanujan’s mathematics reveal, that touch on the fabric of nature. These patterns also touch on our lives. This is brought out in a parallel fictional story set in modern times about an English maths teacher who goes to India and her untimely death, mirroring Ramanujan’s. Her Indian-American husband follows her to India to be with her ghost. This strikes me as a successful blend of science and theatre which also stirs the emotions.
Believable Physics and Theatre
Another noteworthy marriage of physics and theatre is Einstein and Eddington, a 2008 BBC film with David Tennant as the British scientist Arthur Stanley Eddington and Andy Serkis as Einstein.
In the early decades of the 20th century Eddington was the world’s greatest astrophysicist. In 1919 he verified a spectacular prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, making Einstein world famous overnight. In this film the science is accurately conveyed while taking creative license with the two protagonists’ lives. This is a film about ideas, in which Tennant and Serkis actually look quite like the characters they portray, without being caricatures, as is too often the case with Einstein. They also know how to ‘speak science’.
This can be a problem. Too often playwrights and directors have virtually no experience of how scientists talk or behave towards each other. Scientists are sometimes consulted on these matters but the problem persists. Perhaps we need actor-scientists? At times the actors in Oppenheimer sound like musicians comparing each other’s compositions.
Medicine and Theatre
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is a tour de force that is frequently revived. But how is the science? The play revolves around chaos theory, thermodynamics and determinism. Rather than attempting to explain these, Stoppard dazzles with a brilliant plot that brings together scientists and poets and veers towards the esoteric. It is also a delightful scientific detective story with two time lines hundreds of years apart, sometimes with both onstage at the same time, all delivered in Stoppard’s trademark effervescent dialogue.
It is a celebration of theatre and science and of erudite thinking across disciplines, enabling Michael Baum to make his significant discovery about cancer. It’s a brilliant example of the power of science as theatre.
Going Even Further With Alchemy, Psychology and Physics in Theatre
When I wrote my own play, Synchronicity, I was determined to get inside the heads of Jung and Pauli. My play explores their vibrant and sometimes stormy relationship. In their discussions they struck sparks off each other and in the end both were changed.
Synchronicity is about psychology, physics, alchemy and the extraordinary things that can happen when great minds meet. I re-imagined much of the dialogue using Jung’s and Pauli’s extensive correspondence as well as Jung’s book Psychology and Alchemy which incorporates Jung’s notes from his analysis sessions with Pauli. To be sure that the actors actually spoke like scientists, I coached them myself. I was gratified when Jungian analysts came up to me after performances and told me I had caught the essence of these sessions.
The Future of Science and Theatre
For science to work as theatre we need poetic license, re-imagining so as to get inside the scientist’s head, going beyond the documents at hand. At some point the director will take over and, no matter what the opinions of the playwright, may insert material and interpretations that have dramatic value but play fast and loose with the truth. The question is, does this matter and if so, how much? And should the playwright be completely removed from the loop?
What can we pull out as the key issues around science as theatre? Is it essential that the science should be accurate? Is it essential that the history of science should be accurate? Or is it more important to engage the audience and give them renewed or greater interest in science? There’s a balance that needs to be found between the human stories being presented and the fact that the characters are - some of them, anyway - scientists.
People tend to assume that science is all about practical matters with practical applications while theatre is all to do with art and artistry. But when the two come together they can spark something quite extraordinary, as in Arcadia inspiring Baum’s discovery in chemotherapy, where a play about science actually changed the course of science and of humanity.
For more see Arthur I. Miller’s website: www.arthurimiller.com
