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Reviews
Stratford Festival
Through September 30
THE PHYSICISTS Tom Patterson Theatre/Stratford Festival
By Augustine Warner
What would you do if you realized you knew something which could turn the planet Earth into a charred mass of atoms floating quietly in the outer fringes of the Milky Way?
That’s a moral question at the heart of Friederich Dűrrenmatt’s “The Physicists,” on the stage of Stratford’s Tom Patterson Theatre.
It’s a very rarely done play in a new adaptation from Michael Healey, set today instead of when the playwright first put it out, more than a half-century ago.
The setting is a little contrived, an annex of a Swiss psychiatric hospital, Les Cerisiers, which houses three patients who are claiming to be famous physicist, Sir Isaac Newton (Graham Abbey), Albert Einstein (Mike Nadajewski) and Johann Wilhelm Möbius (of the strip) (Geraint Wyn Davies).
The boss of the hospital is psychiatrist Fraulein Doktor Mathilde von Zahnd (Seana McKenna).
The play was originally written in the early years of the Cold War and updated by Healey to the events and geopolitical tensions of today.
It remains more than a little implausible.
Gradually, the audience learns both Einstein and Newton aren’t crazy, they are spies sent into the hospital because their governments suspect Möbius knows things no one else does.
He has thought deep thoughts, deeper than anyone has ever considered and decided he has knowledge no one should ever have, especially the fake mental patients he’s housed with and the three are only united by the murders they have committed inside the hospital, protected because they are certified crazy.
There’s a twist to the story, made even more torqued by the corporatist sectors in which we live.
“The Physicists” is often philosophical, raising issues my college Ethics classes delved into deeply without reaching unequivocal decisions.
Do the ends justify the means?
Yes, no or sometimes?
And, if you don’t think that’s a complicated question, you are jumping to conclusions without thinking about it.
You aren’t going to like the conclusion to the play and probably won’t like that question.
Dűrrenmatt wrote plays and raised questions people don’t want asked.
Have you ever seen his “The Visit”?
It’s worth putting on your “to see” list.
“The Physicists” is worth seeing because of the issues probed in it, but also for taut direction from Miles Potter and fine performances from Wyn Davies, Abbey, Nadajewski and McKenna.
It’s also an interesting set because the confined Tom Patterson doesn’t allow much in the way of a performance area for Peter Hartwell to put together, with backless chairs and a dining room table at one end to avoid blocking any of the 600 seats.
While the cast includes everything from the homicide cop Inspector Blocher (Wayne Best) and his team, to Möbius' ex-wife and his three children, along with staff and nurses and the brutal male nurses brought in after the third murder.
In the scheme of things, they are dramatic furniture against the three physicists and Doktor von Zahnd who are the heart of the show.
It’s a fascinating show and I wonder why my Ethics teachers would think of it.
“The Physicists” isn’t a show for everyone because of that mix of a strong adaptation, strong directing and issues which need to be thought about.
See it and see why.
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