The Physicists
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 afflicted with
visions of King Solomon: he’s the wise one, with curiously odd behaviour
emanating from lugubrious Paul Bhattacharjee as a violin-playing,
straggle-haired ‘Einstein’ and snappy Justin Salinger as a curly-wigged (with
apple attached) ‘Isaac Newton’.
At the start, a nurse’s
corpse lays stretched out on the floor. John Ramm as the Ortonesque detective
inspector, face fixed like a dried prune, turns up to investigate. He runs into
the obstructive wall of Sophie Thompson’s hilarious, hunchbacked doctor who
slithers round the stage in a semi-recumbent posture, biting off her lines like
a greedy anaconda.
Einstein and Newton, each
in the pay of a super power, are feigning madness in order to stalk Möbius, who
has chosen to immure himself in the asylum rather than expose humanity to his
terrifying discoveries. His first wife (Miranda Raison, slyly doubling as his
pneumatic nurse and devoted champion) visits with their two boys in lederhosen
who serenade him with a bit of Buxtehude on the
recorder.
Heffernan charts Möbius’
ascent to true madness with unflinching skill and untrammelled passion. It’s a
steely, disciplined performance for so instinctively demonstrative an actor, but
he knuckles down, along with the rest of the cast, to convey the strange,
airless atmosphere of an experiment carried out in laboratory
conditions.
It’s worth recalling that,
in 1963, Peter Brook directed the play for the RSC at the Aldwych in between
his landmark King Lear and The Marat/Sade:
an apocalyptic trilogy of madness and destruction. Rourke’s beautifully weighted
revival, designed by Robert Jones and lit by Hugh Vanstone, is driven less
by urgent despair than a relish for Dürrenmatt’s undiminished theatrical
flair.
