Last Friday I went up to London to see a work-in-progress performance of The Nature of Things – the ‘other’ Dorothy Hodgkin play. I don’t regard it as competition as Esther Shanson’s work is so much more ambitious and complex than Hidden Glory. More than two years ago she set out to tell the stories of three women crystallographers – Kathleen Lonsdale, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin – using dance, drama, music and both still and video projection. The result was a revelation, though still unfinished.
The Place, London’s leading centre for contemporary dance, has supported Esther’s production and it was packed for the free show with an eclectic mix of dance lovers, crystallographers, Dorothy’s relatives and colleagues, and curious members of the public. We saw the first act, which focuses mainly on Kathleen Lonsdale but introduces the other two women, and a video clip from the second act which uses gradually multiplying images of dancers performing to a fast jazz score to represent the three-dimensional structure of insulin.
I know I come to the subject with a lot of prior knowledge and interest, but I was riveted throughout. Esther and her company have developed a wonderfully touching script that fleshes out the relationships between Lonsdale, her mentor William Bragg and her husband Thomas. An altogether more spiky relationship characterises the pairing of a reincarnated Rosalind Franklin and James Watson as they review the history of structural molecular biology. Dorothy’s early, tentative steps in both science and love feature in this first act, but we will have to wait for the second for her ultimate triumph, the solution of insulin.
I’m less qualified to comment on the dance elements, but using dancers to represent the molecules that the three women studied brings out the personal relationships each had with her subject, and the sense of trying to pin down an elusive quarry. For DNA, the extraordinary aerialist Ilona Jäntti wove patterns with her body suspended between two ropes hung from above the stage.
We are promised the complete piece in 2011, and I for one can’t wait.
As promised, here are the tour dates and contact details for Hidden Glory so far. Three more (London, Cambridge and York) are close to confirmation and I will add them as soon as possible.
Wednesday 27 October, The Wickham Theatre, Bristol BS8 1UP, 7.30 pm, as part of the Bristol University Centre for Public Engagement’s Twilight Talks series. Free. Book at www.bristol.ac.uk/twilight-talks
Friday 19 November, Otley Courthouse, Otley, W.Yorks LS21 3AN, 7.30 pm, as part of Otley Science Festival. Book at www.otleycourthouse.org.uk
Miranda Cook as Dorothy Hodgkin ((c)Mark Brome Photographer)
My long absence from the blogosphere is largely due to Dorothy Hodgkin’s centenary, which fell on 12 May 2010 (belated birthday wishes, Dorothy).
For a couple of years I had been sending gentle prompts to various quarters suggesting that something should be done to mark the occasion, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Britain’s only female Nobel-prizewinning scientist. Jim Kennedy, Director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History responded by choosing that date to unveil a bust of Dorothy in the Museum, a long-cherished project that he had managed to pull off with support from the EPA Cephalosporin Fund.
Inspired by a one-woman show about Barbara McLintock, The Longing to Understand by Jane Cox, I offered to write a show about Hodgkin, Hidden Glory, to be performed on the evening of the unveiling. On a scarily short timescale the project came to fruition as a professional show with a wonderful actress, Miranda Cook, and director, Abbey Wright, supported by a young creative team of designer Florence McHugh, lighting designer and production manager Andy Reader, and sound designer Chris Barlow.
Because my promptings had led the Royal Society to hold a commemorative day on 12 May, the Museum event took place on 10 May 2010. Dorothy’s sister Diana, 92, flew all the way from Canada to be there and to unveil the bust; all three of her daughters were also there, as were Dorothy’s daughter Liz Hodgkin and numerous other family and friends. We also invited lots of Oxford chemists and molecular biologists who had known Dorothy. ‘Uncanny’ was the verdict of one of them on Miranda’s performance, which was moving and quietly amusing by turns as it revealed the essential integrity of Dorothy’s scientific and personal lives.
We’re all very proud to have been involved in the project, and hope it can move on to new venues (we did a second performance at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford a few days later); I will post here as soon as we have some dates.
I’m now more convinced than ever that theatre is a great way to introduce audiences to science and scientists, giving them an insight into the scientific life that they will never get either from books or from ‘public engagement’ talks and demonstrations.
