If a man and a woman are travelling towards each other at different speeds, where will they meet? Do our parents hold our footprint or our imprint? Is the speed of light the speed of life? All these questions and more are answered in Neil Bartram's beautifully constructed chamber musical, The Theory of Relativity.
Bartram elegantly bends the laws and properties of physics - speed, motion, sound, light, distance -around everyday situations from a young man coming out as gay to a young woman having an abortion. A number about the disintegration of family, and another on the loss of a mother, reduced me to tears. The book by Brian Hill boasts interesting characters with individual narratives and both amusing and worrying quirks. It is only toward the end that the levels of connectivity between them are revealed.
It's not unique to link love to the laws of physics. Even the brain behind E=mc² did it. 'Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute,' said Einstein. 'Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour. That's relativity.' One wonders however, if by naming the musical The Theory of Relativity, Bartram and Hill have limited where it can go. The concept is great but the story is limited. If they'd called it the Speed of Life, which is one of their lines, it would have demanded less in terms of cleverness and delivered more in terms of a narrative. That said, it's a great evening, and the cast - Simon Bailey, Curtis Brown, Andrew Gallo, Natasha Karp, Joshua LeClair, Rebekah Lowings, Ina Marie Smith and Jodie Steele - is brilliant.
In conclusion: This site has recently suffered a blight. This is the first review in four weeks. What a joyous restart to proceedings. The Theory of Relativity works brilliantly in the intimate space at the Drayton Arms. It's beautifully executed under Christopher Lane's direction and with Barney Ashworth's musical arrangements, and at £15 a ticket it's a steal.
References
The Theory of Relativity Tickets
Drayton Arms Theatre, 153 Old Brompton Road, London SW5 0LJ Run ends 13 June
A couple of typos: E=mc² - 'm' and 'c' must be lower case. Tee shirts worn by the creatives make the same mistake. Joshua's surename is LeClair
ReplyDeleteThanks for that Ken. I will cut and paste from your post as I could not work out how to do 'squared' and without that function it looked better all in caps... LeClair was turned to Eclair by predictive text: it must have thought Joshua moreish:) Corrected.
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