REACH FOR THE LIMITLESS STARS
This 70-minute squib was a big Fringe hit, though one clenched reviewer suggested that it could only appeal to those who love physics. This felt like a challenge, as my school didn’t teach it and I failed in a brief attempt to learn the basics from a GCSE cheat-book during lockdown. But for any theatre-buff there is temptation in the idea of “physics, faith and magic” challenging the human quest for the unknown while using bursts of interpretative dance and a feminist take on forgotten female genius. And as it turned out, Emma Howlett’s play performed by four versatile young women in leotards, was entirely engaging, a good brief cheeky booking for the Jermyn.
Because it is, above all, about the “thrilling immensity of our ignorance”: the things we do not know but grope towards, fascinated, accepting that the visible and tangible can’t be everything, making thought-experiments. I liked the four particles, quarks at the birth of the universe, prancing through a TV game-show in a quantum realm. All four performers switch between roles – a modern PhD supervisor, the murdered genius Hypatia in ancient Egypt, a Victorian occult medium, Vera Rubin uncovering the rotation of galaxies, staff at the Large Hadron Collider – but at its centre is a PhD student (Sophie Kean). She is trying to decide whether to carry on with her research, arguing about Deliveroos with her partner who stuck to the observable and became a doctor. She has to hunching over screen upon screen of data looking for an elusive sigma (apparently that’s an electron or orbital with zero angular momentum about an internuclear axis, don’t ask me). But there’s a jolly little particle dance about that too, and a proper thrill even for us outsiders in the lines “The model starts to tremble, knowledge begins to shake, and what we think we know is bending,as to break…when your data shows five sigma, it’s Nature telling you that of all her clueless subjects, YOU have found something new!”.
Someone, appallingly, said of Stoppard that his plays make you “feel cleverer”. To me that was always the problem with him. This does the exhilarating opposite: makes you realize you aren’t that clever , and that humanity hasn’t solved it all and probably isn’t meant to. But that there’s beauty in the quest. And, incidentally, that a female brain is no less likely to find the answers so than a man’s.
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk. to 4 April
Rating 4
theatreCat 