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Art and science

Art and science

Dangers of dramatizing science

04 Feb 2002

Recent years have seen several high-profile plays based on the history of science. Robert Marc Friedman argues that such plays can help the public to appreciate what science is about, but warns that playwrights must be careful how they portray historical characters.

Dramatic licence

To what extent can drama provide an insight into the scientific enterprise? And to what extent can theatre be used as a vehicle for exploring the history of science? These questions are more than just of esoteric interest, following the huge success of historical plays like Copenhagen, which examines the war-time meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, and others based on episodes or figures from history, such as Breaking the Code and QED.

Playwrights have been using the stuff of history from earliest times, and historical drama, in its many forms and variations, is a well established genre in Western theatrical tradition. Yet the two – history and drama – do not necessarily have compatible goals. They also differ in how they try to achieve these goals. As the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello playfully noted, truth doesn’t have to be plausible, but fiction does.

Thus, the historian of science must at times accept the chaotic and the contingent, the randomness and even the apparent meaninglessness of events and actions. The playwright, however, must work with a structured logic grounded in dramatic conventions. Indeed, playwrights have been known to reject historical truths because they appear so implausible: on stage the actual events might seem too contrived or the villains too melodramatic or too passive. Instead, the constructed drama presents an artifact more plausible, seemingly truer, than the actual historical record.

But how far dare the dramatist deviate from that record? And, of course, whose authoritative record are we referring to when treating a controversial subject?

Drama and deeper truths

Drama on stage is much more seductive as a representation of history than scholarly texts. Thus even non-realistic depictions that do not purport to represent faithfully events and persons still tend to make the audience feel that they have experienced history. And even when the audience is well aware that the factual content of a history-based play is false, they may still find the play engrossing, urgent and in touch with some deeper truth.

It is often argued that playwrights must sometimes depart from historical detail in order to provide accurate and engaging portrayals of the underlying historical forces. The problem is that, on closer inspection, such plays depict and probe not the social relations or political processes at the time of the subject, but those of the dramatist instead. Classical historical plays – be it the works of Shakespeare, Schiller, Strindberg or Brecht – seem to address the political realities of their own times, rather than those of the previous eras in which they are set. True, historians also write with the present and future in mind, but they necessarily must interpret and seek understanding from within the relevant historical context derived from that particular time and place.

So why must dramatists use people and events from history when their purpose is to illuminate an argument or to provoke discussion? The answer can be seen in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1962 play The Physicists, in which the author frees himself from actual facts and personalities in order to mould a drama that playfully, but forcefully, raises questions about ethical responsibility for research. In the play, Dürrenmatt creates three fictional physicists in an asylum, who claim to be Newton, Einstein and King Solomon. But are they mad, or simply acting mad to ensure that the nuclear secrets they have uncovered will remain out of the hands of those who might use them for evil? The play, which became a fixture in post-war theatre, engages the audience intellectually and emotionally, without referring to actual historical episodes.

Drama and real history

But what if the playwright begins not with a fictional plot or an imaginary set of characters, but with a real historical episode? What if the stuff of history appears so compelling, so electrifying, that the dramatist decides to shape it, mould it and pound it into a workable dramatic structure?

Of course, for professional historians of science, that which normally holds our interest may not be the stuff of drama at all. But many of our concerns are certainly of more than academic interest. Drama may well reside, for example, in scientists’ social, moral and professional dilemmas, such as their struggle for recognition, for resources, for arriving at new findings, and for gaining acceptance of these. If theatre is chosen as the vehicle for exploring such episodes, we must accept a basic truth: theatre cannot readily depict narrative history unfolding over time and ought not to try.

Drama can stimulate thought and raise questions. No medium can better convey the immediacy of emotions – and science, after all, entails not only cold logic but also cauldrons of hot passion. Theatrical convention can be used to explore the complexity of a scientist’s emotional, intellectual and moral make-up. Although never a substitute for history, a play based on history that is crafted by a skilled and intellectually able dramatist can open windows onto aspects of science that can prod audiences to reflect on or read further about. The pay-off is the degree to which particular scientific events and the personalities connected with these are thereby allowed to enter our cultural heritage and popular imagination – rather than remaining the property of academic historians and scientists.

Consider a play such as Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Although primarily concerned with the slippery nature of historical reconstruction and the epistemological problem of what we actually can know of other people’s – and our own – motives, it has clearly brought significant chapters in the history of modern physics to the attention of many non-specialists. In exploring the events in 1941 when Werner Heisenberg visited Niels Bohr in Nazi-occupied Denmark, Frayn chooses a fictive situation for the drama: the historical characters return from the dead and try to make sense of what did or did not happen.

Frayn provides a wonderful display of intellectual and emotional fireworks. Although he makes no claim for the play to be actual history, he also notes (in the preface) his indebtedness to a number of historians, who themselves disagree in interpreting what actually took place at that legendary 1941 meeting.

But regardless of the playwright’s intentions and even extreme care in creating his characters, audiences may leave the theatre with a wide range of impressions. In the case of the London production of Copenhagen on the evening that I attended, members of the audience with whom I spoke came away believing Bohr to be no better morally than Heisenberg; perhaps even less sympathetic. I am not sure, however, that this was the playwright’s intention. Without second-guessing Frayn’s own meaning and without wanting to judge the ability of an audience on a Friday evening to grasp nuance, I felt uncomfortable.

How malleable is history?

Perhaps I am being over-sensitive. Nevertheless, in a TV film for which I wrote the screenplay, a German scientist was to appear in a Wehrmacht uniform as a member of the armed forces. The director, however, dressed him in the uniform of the SS. This shamed a man who was still alive in the memory of his colleagues and family. True, accidents and mistakes do occur in film and theatre productions. The problem is that small adjustments in interpretation of the dramatic text by a director or performer for the sake of artistic effect can result in a deviation from what might be considered a reasonable portrayal of a person from history. And given that theatre audiences have been known to down more than a few drinks during the interval, should playwrights avoid complexity in plot and thought in the second half? Needless to say, the writer who obsesses over such angst-inducing concerns will not get much down on paper.

I have for some time been sketching ideas for plays based on my own historical research. Some of the scientists involved lived not too long ago. But when dramatizing the history of science, we are on terrain that is generally foreign to traditions in historical drama. Playwrights usually tend to choose historical characters who have already achieved legendary status: kings, queens, statesmen and others who are already public property. Audiences can then appreciate how the dramatist has interpreted or altered received history to make a point of contemporary importance. Few scientists, however, have achieved such status. Most scientists are not only not legendary but are hardly known to the public. Even practising scientists have little insight into any but the most well known researchers of times past.

When a playwright breathes life into a name from history and creates a seemingly real person who is as new for the audience as any fictional character, there should be some sense of responsibility for how that person is portrayed. Some directors and playwrights might say that the artist is only responsible to art: nobody takes theatre to be more than theatre. Historical drama, they might argue, has its own conventions and traditions; it does not purport to be history.

This may well be the case, but is it simply a matter of prudishness that brings me back to the question: just how malleable is historical scholarship in the forge of artistic imagination before intellectual and moral integrity snaps?

* This article is based on comments given by the author at the symposium Copenhagen and Beyond: Drama Meets History of Science organized by the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen on 22-23 September 2001.

Books by the author

Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology: Amazon UK/Amazon US

The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Science: Amazon UK/Amazon US

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