Science: Dramatic. Science Plays in America and Great Britain, 1990–2007 (review)

The relationship between theatre and science is a rich one that has become a significant and growing area of scholarly enquiry in the last decade. Eva-Sabine Zehelein's Science: Dramatic serves as an interesting, if occasionally partisan, addition to this field, and it contains a rich range of material that will make it a valuable source for specialists in contemporary Anglophone drama. The book's central argument is that the incorporation of science into dramatic texts engenders what is a specific genre in its own right: "science-in-theatre," a term and an idea she adopts from the polemical writings of distinguished chemist-turned-playwright Carl Djerassi. Creating a taxonomy of science plays, Zehelein provides a sense of the variety of ways in which scientific discourse, ideas, and personalities featured in drama during the seventeen-year period from 1990–2007.

Science: Dramatic has two main areas of inquiry. The first of these is a lengthy exploration and admirable synthesis of theoretical ground that ranges from C.P. Snow and his infamous Rede lecture of 1959 on "Two Cultures" (of art and science), through to the "science wars" and Sokal's hoax, and finally to a persuasive defence of the study of dramatic texts as against performance studies. The second, which covers roughly two thirds of the book, is the analysis of dramatic texts that feature science or scientists. Zehelein identifies three main categories of science play: "science-in-theatre"; "history of science in theatre"; and what she calls "borderliners." Discussing the first category, Zehelein represents Djerassi's plays as characterized by the highest degree of engagement with science and places them alongside Shelagh Stephenson's An Experiment with an Air Pump, Stephen Poliakoff's Blinded by the Sun, and, perhaps more controversially, David Auburn's Proof. (Some have argued that the play barely belongs in a consideration of science and theatre at all. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, for example, observes that the play's "mathematicians might just as well be painters or poets, since the central concern is not with mathematical genius specifically" [128]). The second category concerns the intersection of drama, science, and history, and it is here that Zehelein groups Michael Frayn's celebrated science play, Copenhagen, alongside plays on scientists involved in the discovery of nuclear fission and the elucidation of the structure of DNA. The third and final category, Zehelein's "borderliners," is reserved for those plays that she perceives as being less engaged with scientific ideas than are those in the previous two categories. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard is placed in this third category under the sub-heading of "Science to Play With" because, she argues, it "employs thermodynamics and Fermat's Last Theorem for a fireworks of intellectual gambling" (273). It is one of the book's strengths that its author has managed to organize under these three umbrella categories an impressive range of plays (both published and in manuscript) from the United States and Great Britain, discussing a range of dramatists too numerous to list here. She mines a surprising number of plays about Richard Feynman, explores Maureen Hunter's Transit of Venus, and provides an analysis of the unpublished but intriguing Louis Slotin Sonata by Paul Mullin.

One striking aspect of Science: Dramatic is the prominence that it accords to Djerassi's dramatic texts. As a study, it gives ample critical space to the plays and to his ideas in relation to science and theatre. Djerassi is a controversial figure within the field of theatre and science, not least because he has been an active contributor to the debate about what constitutes a science play. In her analysis of his An Immaculate Misconception and Oxygen (co-written with Roald Hoffmann), Zehelein reveals the complexity of ideas in Djerassi's texts rather than concentrating on their putative theatrical weaknesses. She is not as sympathetic in her treatment of theatre- and performance-studies scholars, however, even accusing one of a "short and...