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Science as spectacle

In Britain (and to some extent in the USA), Stoppard and Frayn have become the canonical reference points for science in theatre. But there is another strand of contemporary theatre that is keen to engage much more directly with the visual aspects of science. Its practitioners call it physical theatre, visual theatre, experimental theatre, or even 'total theatre'. Its inspiration comes from people like Brook, the French revivalist of mime Jacques Lecoq, and the grand thaumaturgists of physical performance Antoine Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski.

This movement brings to bear a rich and strange concoction of techniques and traditions: clown and circus skills, traditional mime, dance, puppetry, Commedia dell'Arte. At its worst it dissolves into the tedious and introspective incoherence of some 'experimental theatre' of the 1960s and 70s; at its best, it produces some of the most sublime and exciting theatre you can find anywhere. The masters of the art are surely Theatre de Complicité, a collaborative company that devises its own texts and makes movement and physicality an integral part of its storytelling.

David Harradine is a member of another company, Fevered Sleep, that includes a strong element of the visual and the physical in its work. Fevered Sleep recently collaborated with Nottingham-based photographer and chemist Dallas Simpson to develop a production called Written with Light, which, in Harradine's words, looked at the "history and poetry of photographs". The company explored, with Simpson's assistance, the ways in which photographic images could be chemically manipulated. Harradine says that working with a scientist not only helped with technicalities but also revealed to him "the incredibly rich creative potential that can be found in the bringing of a scientific knowledge or perspective to the artistic process."

Brian Lipson's visually rich A Large Attendance in the Antechamber took us into the strange and disturbing world of Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin and the originator of eugenics. There was little historical about this production; we were not supposed to regard it as an accurate portrayal of Galton the man. Instead, there were projections, maps, strange and ingenious devices: a feast for the eyes. We emerge little the wiser about who Galton was and what he thought, but without any doubt that we have seen something theatrical and engaging.

Another one-man show that combined scientific material with physical theatre was Paul Jepson's The Idiot, a re-telling of Dostoevsky's tale of the na•ve and epileptic Prince Myshkin. Jepson and the performer Claus Damgaard consulted with people who suffer from epilepsy so that the portrayals of seizures might be not just physically but also psychologically as realistic as possible. The play grew from a short production commissioned for a scientific conference on epilepsy, and Jepson says that the doctors at the conference were keen to ask Damgaard after the performance how his 'seizures' felt-since this is something real epilepsy patients cannot describe.

But is mimicking an epileptic fit at all akin to experiencing one? The remarkable thing about physical performance, as many actors will testify, is how much the physical conditions the emotional. In the Method acting tradition pioneered by the Russian actor and director Stanislavsky, which has exerted a compelling influence on several generations of stage and screen actors, performers aim to establish their psychological, internal reality before then searching for the gestures and physical language that it seems to demand. But physical performers commonly work the other way around: they find that a particular physicality automatically creates a particular emotional world. The movement comes first, and the actor must be alive to what it tells him or her about the character. One of the most accomplished of physical performers, the Japanese actor Yoshi Oida, describes how this happened when he was preparing for Peter Brooks' production of Oliver Sacks' book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, another play about neurological malfunction:

We began the process by improvising certain scenes from the book. Up until this point, I had always thought that the subject matter for theatre had to be something that was directly connected with the experience of the audience. It might be about love, or family, or death, or politics, but it had to be something that the audience recognised from their own lives. But neurology? If it was psychology perhaps I could identify with it, since I might have experienced the same kind of emotional turmoil. But neurological damage is a very specific phenomenon, and is not often encountered in most people's lives. So for me there was a problem with the material Peter had chosen to work on. I couldn't identify with it, and frankly, I wondered why on earth we were doing it.
   Then people started improvising. I watched them, and suddenly I felt 'I am that person!' It was completely illogical, but I felt the same as that damaged individual. I was terrified. (Yoshi Oida, The Invisible Actor; Methuen, 1997)

This production too involved a lot of research into the neurological conditions being portrayed, by watching documentaries, reading case studies, talking with Sacks himself, and visiting a neurological hospital in Paris. These experiences left a deep impression on Oida:

What I saw in those patients was how strong the basic human energy is· It doesn't matter whether the person is immobile, or near to death, something keeps fighting to maintain life.

I would contend that, while this is something that can certainly be comprehended intellectually, it cannot be convincingly performed without having experienced the physicality of such a situation.

The British theatre and film company Forkbeard Fantasy make inventive and visually arresting use of technology, scientific imagery and scientific themes in their works. Their production The Brain (Figure 1) was featured in the Creating Sparks Festival of Science and Art hosted in London by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 2000, and was the progeny of a collaboration with neurophysiologist Emil Toescu from the University of Birmingham. And science was never far from the surface in Forkbeard Fantasy's riotous re-telling of Frankenstein in 2001.

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