Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✩✩
by Vern Thiessen, directed by Susan Ferley
Grand Theatre, London
February 10-25, 2006
"The Use and Abuse of Science"
London’s Grand Theatre is currently presenting a well-cast, handsomely mounted production of Vern Thiessen’s Governor General’s Award-winning play “Einstein’s Gift”. If the production never really seems to catch fire, it has mostly to do both with the direction and with the play itself. Yet, there is no doubt that the play’s subject matter concerning the use and abuse of science is both important in itself and highly relevant today.
The title of the play is misleading since the main character is not Albert Einstein, who serves as narrator, but Fritz Haber (1868-1934), winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918, and, until recently, largely forgotten. Haber received the Nobel Prize for the “fixation of nitrogen from the air”, a process conceived to fertilize soil that prevented the starvation of millions after World War I and on which billions of people still depend. The same process, however, could also be used to make chlorine gas, a use the German military exploited in World War I and which Haber supported, thus earning him the dubious title as the “father of chemical warfare”. Haber, in fact, personally oversaw the first “successful” release of poison gas at Ypres and on the Eastern Front. In the 1920s he sought unsuccessfully to extract gold from seawater as a means for Germany to pay its war reparations. Later he developed a cyanide gas called Zyklon B to be used as an insecticide. The Nazis found another application when they used it in extermination camps. Members of Haber’s own family were killed there with Zyklon B.
Thiessen has constructed the play so that its two acts reflect each other. In Act 1 Haber converts from Judaism to Christianity because he knows it will improve his chances for advancement in Germany. At the end of Act 2, he returns to Judaism, in exile from a Nazi Germany that still regards him as Jewish. Act 1 focusses on Haber’s meeting his first wife Clara and on the positive and negative outcomes of his fixation of nitrogen. Act 2 focusses on he meeting his second wife Charlotta and his development of Zyklon B.
The play begins in 1945 with Einstein reflecting on his friendship with Haber and proceeds to guide us through Haber’s life. On the one hand, Thiessen uses Einstein, a theoretical physicist, as the opposite of Haber, who believes strongly in applied science. The warning Haber’s life poses twice over for Einstein is that any development in science, theoretical or not, can be used for mankind’s betterment or its destruction. To make that point, though, it is not necessary that Einstein be the narrator. It’s rather like writing a play about Salieri’s life with Mozart as the narrator. One suspects that Thiessen has used Einstein to make the play more accessible and put his name in the title to generate interest. “Haber’s Gift” would, in fact, be a more appropriate and ironic title, especially since the word “Gift” means “poison” in German. Having the figure of Einstein skulk about the stage, watching the scenes he is recounting and, besides playing himself, taking on bit parts as photographer and such, seems faintly ridiculous.
The production is well cast. Jerry Etienne gives Haber a strict, stiff Prussian personality whose instinct is to repress emotion. Except for one outburst near the very end, Thiessen gives us little opportunity to discover what Haber thinks of the numerous contradictions in his life and work. In absence of this, Etienne creates the sense of a man who lives behind a façade of received ideas and makes us wonder what kind of catastrophe it will take to shatter it. Haysam Kadri is a very believable, albeit rather too handsome, Einstein, whose tone of voice brings out the work’s sense of chastened nostalgia. Einstein was young once, too, and it is good to avoid caricature, but one doesn’t really imagine him moving with the grace and agility Kadri gives him.
Claire Jullien is excellent as Haber’s first wife Clara Immerwahr, a scientist in her own right who helps Haber with his work but, despite her intelligence, has to contend with taking second place. Jullien shows us this growing undercurrent of unease that finally breaks out when Clara is outraged at her husband’s support for chemical warfare. Clara’s story is so interesting it’s a pity she disappears at the end of Act 1. As Haber’s second wife Charlotta, Adrienne Gould equally fine as an outgoing, life-loving woman in contrast to Jullien’s introverted Clara. Shane Carty does as much as he can with the role of Haber’s friend Otto, but Thiessen doesn’t lay enough groundwork to prepare us for Otto turnabout late in the play. William Vickers and Darren Keay both play three roles each. Vickers is especially good as the Nazi supervisor Rust, who tells Haber he must fire all the non-Aryan faculty at his institute. Vickers uses smiles, politeness and a calming tone as Rust metaphorically puts a dagger to Haber’s throat. Unfortunately, Thiessen gives Keay little to do in any of his roles.
The physical production is very appealing. John Thompson has created a clever set of faux-granite and marble suggesting the halls of academe when so many of the scenes take place. A moving wall dividing the set into front and back cleverly facilitates scene changes and suggests the world of external and internal divisions the characters inhabit. Judith Bowden has designed attractive period costumes in creams and browns. So much fun is made of Einstein’s wearing the same jacket over thirty years, one wonders why she did not make it look as worn as it’s said to be. Andrea Lundy’s lighting casts an autumnal glow over most of the scenes but shifts to an appropriate harshness for scenes on the battlefield.
Despite the top-notch cast, an air of lassitude seems to inform the action. Part of the blame has to go to director Susan Ferley, who gives the same unvaried pacing to the entire evening. But most of the blame must rest with Thiessen himself who is so occupied in marching us through his chronology that he gives his characters virtually no time for reflection. Even Einstein as narrator does little more than tick off the passing years rather than comment on them. We get the fairly simple message that science can be used for good or evil, but to be more fully engaged with the characters, we would really like to know more about what these people caught up in such turbulent times think about what is happening and what they are doing.
As a play about science, “Einstein’s Gift” cannot touch a play like Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen” (1998). Not only does the latter play have a more elegant structure, but it is also entirely concerned with the interpretation of events. It makes more demands on its audience but as a result is also more rewarding. I am pleased that Thiessen has brought such a complex, equivocal figure like Fritz Haber to our attention, but I wish he had done so in a more innovative and compelling fashion.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Haysam Kadri as Einstein. ©Claus Anderson.
2006-03-06
Einstein’s Gift