17 Oct 2012 01:44:48
"Putting on a play is a sort of scientific experiment", says Michael Blakemore, director of Michael Frayn's brilliant though somewhat controversial play about physics and physicists, Copenhagen. In this well-researched and illuminating study, Shepherd-Barr explores how the theatre has provided a forum for exploring science. Beginning with Marlowe's "ur-science play" Doctor Faustus she quickly moves on to more "quintessentially postmodern" pieces such as Caryl Churchill's play about genetics, A Number, and John Barrow and Luca Ronconi's exploration of mathematics, Infinities. Ronconi tells the author that "this kind of theatre is looking for hypotheses, rather than starting with them. We don't know the final answer." Shepherd-Barr argues that science plays "enact" complex scientific ideas, such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, merging form and content to yield new metaphorical understandings of science. In the theatre, at least, CP Snow's fears of a rift between the two cultures are unfounded.
