I haven’t read or seen The Physicists for a half-century, and this is a new translation into English by the excellent Canadian playwright Michael Healey. But I wasn’t aware of any drastic changes that Healey has made to the Friedrich Durrenmatt play whose American premiere I saw in 1964. It’s a painfully funny, bitterly disturbing play that was admired but ran very briefly in New York in a lustrous production directed by Peter Brook, starring Hume Cronyn, Robert Shaw, and Jessica Tandy. At Stratford it is directed by Miles Potter, a rather intellectual Canadian director whose work seldom excites me. And it is performed without much furnishings on the overlong, open thrust stage of the rather severe Patterson Theatre where I did not think the characters’ constant escapes to their asylum rooms from the supposedly elegant drawing room would work well. I was wrong. In fact, I found this production both more lucid and more moving (if a bit less funny) than that American original.
Without spoiling the production’s crazy tone and surprises, let’s just say that after watching not only the polite interchanges in an asylum between inmates who imagine themselves to be Einstein, Newton, and an amnesiac named Mobius, we also see them brutally slaughter their kindly nurses onstage and then admit that they are merely trying to save the world. The humpbacked, crazy Doctor who runs the place then foils their plans in order to combine world domination with unimaginable wealth. And they all make fun of the police and national defense thugs who physically threaten them. It’s basically about the survival of mankind, so don’t think that there’s anything here to worry about.
The set and costumes work surprisingly well, but it is Steve Lucas’s lighting designs and Todd Charlton’s eerie sound designs that really affect us. The whole versatile, disciplined cast is wonderfully effective, but it is the four leads who make us laugh, shiver, wonder, despair, and ultimately just appreciate their virtuosic presentation.
Graham Abbey’s “Newton” seems a handsome leading man, then a driven, sincere activist, finally a despairing loser as antagonist to Mike Nadajewski’s “Einstein” who trifles with his violin but is passionately devoted to social causes, and certain snacks. Geraint Wyn Davies’ “Mobius” is tortured by his need to remain hidden and yet continue to explore his discoveries.
Seanna McKenna -- wonderful this year as Gertrude in Hamlet and last year as “Mother Courage”, and in 24 Stratford seasons playing more than 24 Shakespearean roles –- is again unrecognizable as Fraulein Doktor Mathilde. Depending on which scene you’re watching, she’s the funniest and also the most menacing crazy old boss of this asylum I’ve seen.
And even among these virtuosos, Geraint Wyn Davies knocks me out. Without seeming effort, he takes on an astonishing variety of roles, always achieving terrific effects in each, but always naturally. I’ve admired his King Lear and his Falstaff, his singing King Arthur and Henry Higgins and his drunken Stephano and Dylan Thomas, and Elephant Man and Bottom, the weaver, and D’Artagnan; and also Nick Knight, the 800 year-old vampire detective. Here he starts as a seemingly befuddled “poor thing” and ends as an inspiring leader. So I have a new favorite in the role of Mobius.
