Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Lucas Hnath, directed by Adam Belanger
Unit 102 Actors Company, Assembly Theatre, 1479 Queen St West, Toronto
September 29-October 20, 2018
Actor: “The lies are here to help makes sense of the things that are true”
Unit 102 Actors Company is currently presenting the Canadian premiere of the 2013 play Isaac’s Eye by American playwright Lucas Hnath (pronounced “nayth”). Hnath recently has become famous for his play A Doll’s House, Part 2 (2016) which was nominated for eight Tony Awards and will be the most produced play of the 2018-19 season. (Mirvish will be presenting the play in March 2019.) Isaac’s Eye thus might seem to provide an ideal way to get to know Hnath’s writing before A Doll’s House, Part 2. Unfortunately, Isaac’s Eye, about the rivalry between scientists Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and Robert Hooke (1635-1703), is so flawed as a play that it gives little clue to Hnath’s later success.
The play has a narrator known as the Actor (Francis Melling) who in Brechtian fashion announces the act and scene numbers and comments on the action. His particular remarks at the beginning tell us that the play is composed of both fact and fiction. He compares the fictional aspects to Newton’s concept of ether as an all-pervasive substance necessary for the transmission of light and gravity. He tells us that the fiction in the play will allow us to see things we would otherwise not see: “But like ether, the lies are here to help makes sense of the things that are true”. If this means only that we see representations of Newton and Hooke on stage, then he is right. But he says “make sense of” and in that case he is wrong. So much of the play is fiction it’s hard to know what exactly Hnath wants us to understand.
Hnath posits that as a young man Newton (Christo Graham) had a longstanding platonic friendship with a young woman named Catherine (Laura Vincent) and that they would meet in her attic to discuss his ideas about physics and theology. Catherine, an apothecary, would like to marry Newton and settle down in the village of Woolesthorpe where they live. Newton, however, would have to be a farmer and his ambitions lie elsewhere. He is convinced that God has been revealing the true nature of the universe to him and therefore he feels he deserves to belong to the Royal Society (the premier scientific institution in Britain and the oldest in the world) and longs for a fellowship to attend Trinity College, Cambridge. To do this would necessitate moving from the village and prevent Newton from marrying as per the rules of the College.
Wishing the best for Newton, Catherine follows his request and has her father who knows Robert Hooke (Brandon Thomas), curator for experiments of the Royal Society. Hooke at this time was the most famous scientist of his day having made important contributions to mechanics, meteorology, time-keeping, optics, palaeontology and astronomy. In Hnath’s play Newton sends Hooke his only copies of his scientific theories hoping it will encourage Hooke to help Newton join the Royal Society. Instead, Hooke is enraged to discover that Newton’s work in optics is very similar to his own and so he sets out to visit Newton seeking to prevent him from ever publishing his work.
At this point Hnath’s play has set up a fascinating contest between Hooke, an intelligent and diligent scientist with power and fame, and Newton, a genius with neither. The set-up is rather like the conflict between the able court composer Salieri and the genius newcomer Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979). Unfortunately, Hnath takes the subject into an even more melodramatic plot than Shaffer does his. After threats of mutual blackmail, the play culminates in Hooke forcing Newton to perform an experiment on himself of inserting a needle into his tear duct, distorting the shape of his eyeball and noting whether the distortion causes a change in colour perception. For reasons that Hnath leaves completely unclear, the result of this experiment will prove whether light is made up of particles as Newton thinks or of waves as Hooke thinks.
As the Actor admits to us at the end of the play, none of this ever happened. Newton went to Trinity College on the recommendation of his uncle and was later elected as a Fellow. He was elected a member of the Royal Society because of the importance of his published works. Hooke had nothing to do with either. Newton did have disputes with Hooke about optics and about planetary motion but these occurred after Newton was a member of the Royal Society.
The question is how do Hnath’s rather extravagant lies about Newton and Hooke in any way help us to “make sense of the things that are true”? The answer is that they don’t. It is certainly interesting to learn of Hooke’s many and varied accomplishments, but we really don’t learn much about Newton’s theory of optics or about the his theological writing which he regarded as his most important work.
Strangely enough, Hnath does not even get the central symbol of his play right – Newton’s inserting a needle in his eye. Hnath repeatedly insists that the needle is inserted not into the eye but into the tear duct. The problem here is that the tear ducts, except for their openings, go nowhere near the eye but instead into the nose. That’s why people’s noses run when they cry. Newton’s own drawing of the experiment (above and which happens to be displayed in the lobby of the Assembly Theatre) and his description of it make clear that he did not stick a needle (which he calls a bodkin) into his tear duct at all:
“I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the]
backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it (soe as to
make [the] curvature a, bcdef in my eye) there appeared severall white darke &
coloured circles r, s, t, &c. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub
my eye [with the] point of [the] bodkine, but if I held my eye & [the] bodkin
still, though I continued to presse my eye [with] it yet [the] circles would grow
faint & often disappeare untill I removed [them] by moving my eye or [the]
bodkin”.
Thus Newton pushed the needle between the globe of his eye and the bone surrounding it. Hnath claims that we don’t know why Newton stuck a needle into his eye, but, as Newton’s own words show, we do.
Despite all the distractions of Hnath’s fictional history, the point he seems to want to make is that a complete dedication to science or any other discipline involves a withdrawal from the comforts of everyday life. Hnath portrays the most terrible fate people can face as dying alone – a fear expressed by Newton, Hooke and the plague-victim Sam (also Melling) in the course of the action. Hnath’s fictional version of Newton and Hooke’s rivalry is intriguing into Act 2 until the plot development requiring a 180º character change in Catherine becomes too farfetched.
What makes the Unit 102 production watchable is its ingenious design and the fine performances of the entire cast. Christo Graham plays Newton as a genius with poor skills in relating to other people including people he likes like Catherine. Graham portrays Newton as if Newton were constantly preoccupied and speaks with other people as though he is simultaneously working out problems in his mind. His Newton is completely unaware of his egocentricity and simply views it as a fact that God is revealing truth through him. Though he seems very moral, Newton, since he feels he serves a higher power, feels no hesitation in lying or in blackmailing to further his own cause.
Laura Vincent’s Catherine is the delightfully sensible, down-to-earth counterpart to Christo’s Newton. It is instantly apparent why Newton would need someone like Vincent’s Catherine as a sounding board for his ideas since she is the only human in contact with reality that he can endure. Vincent shows how Catherine finds herself less in the the position of lover that she would like and more in the position of mother that she grudgingly adopts simply because she wants to please Newton.
Francis Melling does fine work as both the Actor and as the peasant Sam. He is serious and instructive as the Actor and desperate and wracked with pain as Sam. Often, he has to switch with rapidity and precision between the two to act the part of Sam and then to comment on his actions. The highpoint of his performance is a great scene where full of fear as Newton and Hooke probe his tear duct with a needle, Sam movingly recalls all the things that he loves about life as if to comfort himself during his ordeal.
Director and set designer Adam Belanger deserves special mention for creating such an ingenious set. The three all-wooden walls and the floor easily serve as both an interior and exterior when needed. On the lath that covers the walls the Actor writes the true bits of the story we are seeing, but Belanger has cleverly designed the walls so that individual laths can be removed to reveal more writing underneath. Especially inventive is Belanger’s solution for depicting the country road that Hnath calls for twice in the action. Jenni Lee Manis’s costume design is smart. Rather than decking the actors out in all the regalia of the 17th century, she has shifted the time period to the 1920s or 30s. Catherine and Newton’s lack of wealth is shown through the simplicity of their clothing while the self-important Hooke from the big city is dressed in a three-piece suit rather as if he were more a businessman than a scientist which is indeed the impression he creates.
Those interested in an early work by the winner of multiple awards will want to check out Isaac’s Eye to see if there are themes there that Hnath later develops. Those who appreciate fine acting will want to enjoy the bounty Unit 102 has assembled. Those, however, who want to be caught up in a story that does not go off the rails three-quarters of the way through or those who want to have some insight into the very different views of science of Newton and Hooke, will have to look elsewhere.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Graham Christo as Newton and Brandon Thomas as Hooke, ©2018 Unit 102 Actor Company; “Of Colours” (Newton’s Laboratory Notebook MS Add.3975, Cambridge University Library); Francis Melling as Sam and Brandon Thomas as Hooke. ©2018 Unit 102 Actor Company.
For tickets, visit www.unit102actors.com.
2018-10-04
Isaac's Eye