Author: Science Centre Stage

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Nick Payne’s Incognito Dates for London and Newcastle

The Bush Theatre in London has announced that Nick Payne’s new play Incognito will form part of its 2014 season. Joe Murphy will direct the production which runs between 14 May and 21 June 2014, after premiering at the High Tide Festival in April.

In addition to featuring a plot about the theft of Einstein’s brain during his autopsy in 1955, Incognito also deals with Henry M, whose neurosurgery for epilepsy in 1957 permitted new insights into the nature of memory. A third theme about a modern day neuropsychologist facing the breakdown of her marriage completes a trio of interwoven tales.

There will also be previews of Incognito at the Live Theatre in Newcastle 3-5 April 2014 followed by a full production later the same month.

Incognito

 

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Best Actor Nomination for BBC Radio Copenhagen

Simon Russell Beale has been nominated for Best Actor in an Audio Drama for his portrayal of Neils Bohr in last year’s BBC Radio 3 adaption of Copenhagen. The winners of the BBC Audio Drama Awards will be announced at a ceremony in the BBC Radio Theatre in London on Sunday 26th January.

Copenhagen was adapted and directed by Emma Harding and was broadcast in January 2013. Benedict Cumberbatch played Werner Heisenberg and Greta Scacchi played Bohr’s wife Margrethe in the 90 minute audio version of Michael Frayn’s classic play.

Beale is up against Lee Ross and Joseph Millson in the Best Actor category, which is being judged by journalist and presenter Libby Purves, actor and writer Ruth Jones and gossip columnist Baz Bamigboye.

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Festival of Science Plays in Florida

An Experiment With An Air Pump by Shelagh Stephenson and Photograph 51 by Anna Zeigler both feature in a festival of ‘science plays’ being held in Orlando, Florida this weekend. Mad Cow Theatre are giving rehearsed readings of four plays under the overall direction of Denise Gillman between 10th and 12th of January.

The Science Play Festival
The Science Play Festival

Photograph 51 deals with Rosalind Franklin’s oft overlooked contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and is named after the famous X-ray crystallography photo that provided vital evidence for the breakthrough.

An Experiment With An Air Pump uses Joseph Wright’s 18th century painting of an enlightenment scientist giving a demonstration to entranced onlookers as inspiration for a play set over two time periods.

An adaption for of Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything by Lauren Gunderson and Lucas Hnath’s play about Isaac Newton, Isaac’s Eye, complete the bill of four staged readings.

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Science on Stage 2013: A Year in Review

The year 2013 has been a good one for the science-in-theatre genre with numerous performances of established classics staged throughout the world as well as new plays appearing on the scene.

The year began with the final few performances of Lucy Prebble’s The Effect at The National Theatre in London. The complexities of love amid a neuropharmacology clinical trial attracted both sell-out audiences and a clutch of awards and nominations for the Headlong/NT team.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s new version of Brecht’s A Life of Galileo in the Swan Theatre brought audiences to Stratford-Upon-Avon to enjoy a lively and musical production with set-design by Tom Scutt.

Several new plays portraying the history of science opened throughout the year. Operation Epsilon by Alan Brody premiered in Boston USA, dealing with the post-war detention of German nuclear scientists and offering an intriguing postscript to Michael Frayn’s mighty Copenhagen. STELLA, a new play by Sibohan Nicholas featuring portrayals of 18th Century astronomers Caroline and William Herschel, opened in Brighton in May and went on to tour small venues in the UK and Ireland throughout the summer.

A highlight of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August was Adura Onashile’s portrayal of Henrietta Lacks in her one-woman show HeLa. Onashile’s performance brought the story of Lacks treatment in the 1950s and the prolifically multiplying cell line that has lived on in the decades since her death to ever-wider audiences. The wartime code-breaking endeavors of Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park were also brought to life at the Edinburgh Festival in Idle Motion’s immensely imaginative That is All You Need to Know.

As ever, Frayn’s Copenhagen and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia proved popular choices for professional and amateur theatre companies throughout the world. In Hong Kong there was a reading of Copenhagen in Mandarin in October and as well as a revival of a production given by Nobel laureates in Gothenburg in December. The appeal of Arcadia was confirmed this year when it was voted fourth in a list of the Britain’s favorite plays.

There are promising events in store for 2014 with the world premiere of Dava Sobel’s play about Copernicus And the Sun Stood Still set for production in Denver in April. With new tours of STELLA, Hanging Hooke and A Life of Galileo on the cards in the UK as well as a new play about neuroscience on the way from Constellations playwright Nick Payne, 2014 is looking bright for science-in-theatre.

 

 

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Incognito: Nick Payne Tackles Neuroscience in New Play

A new play about neuroscience by Nick Payne will premiere at the HighTide festival in Suffolk in 2014. Payne, who enjoyed success with Constellations, has written Incognito for the festival which takes place in Halseworth between 10-19 April. According to the Guardian, Incognito has a similarly complex structure to Constellations and weaves several stories, including a plot about the autopsy in which Einstein’s brain was removed and dissected in 1955.

Incognito will be in preview at Theatre Live Newcastle between 3-5 April and will also be performed at the North Wall Arts Centre in Oxford between 6-10 May 2014.

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Life of Galileo to Tour in 2014

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent production of A Life of Galileo is returning to the stage in 2014.  Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the Theatre Royal Bath are reviving the RSC production with Ian McDairmid remaining in the title role.  Opening in Birmingham on 28th February, the production will go on tour to Bath and Kingston during March.

Tour dates for A Life of Galileo:

Meanwhile, stage designer Tom Scutt has been talking about his work in two recent interviews here and here. Scutt, who also designed the set for Constellations, worked on A Life of Galileo for the RSC.

 

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National Theatre Includes Science Classics in 50th Anniversary Gala

Two science-in-theatre classics featured in the National Theatre’s 50th Anniversary evening of celebration on 2nd November. Scenes from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen were revived as part of the gala event broadcast live from the NT’s Olivier Theatre.

Actor Roger Allam, who presented Michael Frayn with a special Laurence Olivier Award in April this year, performed the speech from the close of Copenhagen in which Heisenberg recalls an encounter with an SS soldier in Bavaria at the end of the Second World War.

Rory Kinnear played pompous literary scholar Bernard Nightingale in an excerpt from Act II of Arcadia.

Both plays were first produced by the National Theatre. Arcadia opened in the  Lyttelton Theatre on 13th April 1993, directed Trevor Nunn with Bill Nighy in the role of Bernard. Copenhagen premiered in the Cottesloe Theatre in 1998, directed by Michael Blakemore.

A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe.

Bernard Nightingale provokes Valentine. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, Act II Scene 1

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Mathematics and Theatre to Reconverge in Manchester

The similarity between mathematics and the constructed world of the theatre is one of the themes addressed in X&Y, a new production recently performed at London’s Science Museum. Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and actor Victoria Gould, who play the two characters X and Y,  joined forces to develop the play after working together previously on Complicite theatre company’s A Disappearing Number. X&Y will also be performed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester between the 30th October and 3rd November 2013 as part of Manchester Science Festival.

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Sleep Science Performance Returns to London

somˈniloquy   n. the act or habit of speaking during sleep.
Oxford English Dictionary

Somniloquy, a new monologue written by Craig Baxter for the 2013 Hotbed Festival, is being staged again as part of a four week run at London’s Theatre 503. The 25 minute piece, which is performed by Jasmine Hyde, follows a young woman through a night of observation at a sleep laboratory. Baxter wrote the monolougue in collaboration with sleep scientist Prof. Richard Horner as part of Menagerie Theatre Company’s ‘What’s Up Doc?’ scheme which pairs playwrights with thought leaders and academics. The practical issues of portraying someone sleeping on stage are overcome with imaginative set design by Nicky Bunch.

Jasmin Hyde also performs with Mark Oosterveen in Steve Waters’ Why Can’t We Live Together?, a  powerful and moving new play tracking the relationship of a couple over the first decade of the 21st Century. The triple bill is completed with another curiously arresting performance from Oosterveen in Hisham Matar’s How to Begin.

The three plays will be performed together between 15th October and 9th November at Theatre 503 in Battersea, London.