The Physicists

Synopsis

Another nurse murdered in the world's most illustrious sanatorium. And who's to blame this time: Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein or the brilliant Johann Wilhelm Mobius? But what are these great minds doing here, together at the same time? Who are these men? And what have they got to hide?

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 8 June 2012

Nothing but respect to Donmar supremo Josie Rourke for a meticulous and mostly riveting revival of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s weird but seriously dated comedy of madmen and weapons of mass destruction in the pristine white setting of a Swiss lunatic asylum run by a hunchbacked female psychiatrist.

But it’s hard to get very agitated, as audiences must have been back in the early 1960s, about the incipient terrors of the Cold War crisis the play alludes to throughout, even though the arguments about “responsible” research are always with us.

The show – in a new “version” by Jack Thorne, from a literal translation by Christine Madden – is best enjoyed now as a farcical teaser, with tricky jokes about concepts of madness and depression, and some wonderful acting, not least from John Heffernan as Möbius, one of just three internees in the luxury clinic.

Möbius is afflic...

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Latest User Review

Dave F-T - 14 July 2012:

really boring and played like a carry on film - this was poor....

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