“An interesting production which gives space to dialogue most of us would never dare to have.“
Kate Stratford
3 ‘what-ifs’
Riverside
10 May – 13 May 2023
“What if?”
It is the beginning of all historical fiction and all scientific enquiry. And so it is that “what if” is playwright Mark St Germain’s premise which postulates that Albert and Minerva Einstein’s daughter, born in 1902 but never heard of or seen again after 1904, did not die of scarlet fever as history assumed. What if, disguised, she found her way to him in 1942 and confronted him?
Initially, Relativity presents as a debate over the question: does a great man first have to be a good man? By the second half of the play, however, the argument has broadened. Now the philosophy of the sanctity of life is set against the theory of human life value. Does all human life have an inherent worth and sacredness, or is each life to be valued in the way it benefits others? Einstein (Nicholas Papademetriou) and his inquisitor (Nisrine Amine) battle it out, always championing an opposing point of view. No prizes for guessing which side Einstein is on, if you know anything of the man.
The tension which might have been created by this dichotomy was, unfortunately undermined by the design. Somewhere between metaphorical and literal, the mismatched, grubby interior with scrawlings of E=mc2 in patches seemed unsure of where it wanted to go and what it wanted to do to support the play. Clumsy anachronisms abound ( such as a cheap Bunnings door handle which can be opened with a 70 year old key). It might be 1942 and the room of a professor who could not care less about décor, but nothing looked comfortable or probable. And in a “what-if” scenario, realism has already been dismissed as a framework.
Papdemetriou delivers a suitably shambolic Einstein; pragmatic and witty and not particularly likeable. He is dismissive of Amine’s Margaret, struggling with her secrets and intention to hold Einstein to account for his personal life; a life guarded by an almost cerberean Miss Dukas (Alison Chambers). It should be a tour de force by the ensemble but at times it felt like a pushing out of emotion without any kind of physicalised sense of the relationship between the actors on the stage. Some directorial choices (Johann Walraven) seemed a little phoned in by this usually clever director, with movement and placings not allowing for the visceral embodiment of the concepts the play was attempting. The important reveal was lost in what is surely, the most important moment of the play.
An interesting production which gives space to dialogue most of us would never dare to have.
Kate Stratford, Theatre Now
