Carl Djerassi and the challenge of making drama of ‘science-in-theatre’ (original) (raw)

Though Carl Djerassi, the pioneer of the birth control pill, was enormously energetic in promoting the discussion of ideas, his dramas, or “science-in-theatre” pieces, 11 in all, have never taken wing in Britain. Occasionally they have popped up on the fringe, usually directed by Andy Jordan: three of them received mixed but stimulating reviews and comparison with the scientific and philosophical plays of Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard.

In An Immaculate Conception, seen at the Edinburgh festival in 1998 followed by a run at the New End in Hampstead, north London, and another fringe revival in 2002, a female fictional inventor of “introcytoplasmic sperm injection” turned this treatment for male infertility to her own morally dubious advantage.

Oxygen, co-written with Roald Hoffmann, a professor of humane letters at Cornell, was presented at Riverside Studios, west London, in 2001 in the centenary year of the Nobel prize, and discussed whether that honour for the “discovery” of oxygen should have gone to a Swedish apothecary, an English Unitarian minister or a French chemist and tax collector; the jauntiness of the idea never translated into real drama, though the play did begin with the three contenders’ wives in a sauna making the most of a layman’s struggle to keep up. Djerassi was at least good at making things sound less complicated than we think.

Foreplay, at the King’s Head, Islington, north London, last year pitched two other great minds, the political theorist Hannah Arendt and the philosopher Theodor Adorno, against each other in a debate over the mystery of the critic Walter Benjamin’s briefcase. What did it contain, as he carried it over the Pyranees before he died in 1940? The answer, disappointingly, was pornography. The Telegraph critic Matt Trueman described it as “awful schlocky… a country house mystery with a highbrow slant and a dusting of salacious gossip”.