18 October − 15 November

Tuesday to Saturday 7.30pm

Sunday 4.30pm

Circa Anniversary/Guy Fawkes’ Fireworks Night: Saturday, 8 November 7pm performance time

Adults $46

Concession $38

Friends of Circa (until 2 November) $33

Groups 6+ $39 20+ $36

Under 25s $25

Thoroughly engaging if somewhat ethereal

BY JOHN SMYTHE, THEATREVIEW, 19 OCTOBER 2014

Billed in publicity as “the hottest young writer in the UK right now”, American playwright Lucas Hnath likes to play at playmaking and this time, as produced by a totally onto it team directed by Paul McLaughlin, it works. In performance, at least,Isaac’s Eye is hugely entertaining.

Whereas I found only pointless perversity in Hnath’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about The Death of Walt Disney at Circa a couple of months ago, perversity may be seen as the point in Isaac’s Eye. Oh: an unintended pun there, given the role of a needle in the drama. But to say more about that would be a spoiler, so I’ll let it stand (which it does). Except to add that, the way Hnath tells it, it was hearing about the needle incident that provoked his enquiry into – and imagining of – what would possess a man to do such a thing, and led to his writing the play.

The primary perversity is that although the imagined encounters between a young Isaac Newton, his friend and would-be wife Catherine Storer, and the more established and respected scientist Robert Hooke took place in the 17th century – circa the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London (1666) – the characters present as 21st century New Zealanders. This is a conceit that works very well.

Then there is the narrating Actor who tells us the play is full of ether because Newton knew, or thought he knew, there was ether everywhere. And even though that theory was wrong, it allowed him to postulate and prove things that turned out to be right. Which is also true of the play, the Actor says – and to help us distinguish fact from fiction, he will write only true things on the wall. Plenty remains unwritten.

The blackboard walls are, I presume, prescribed in the script and set designer William Duignan has chalked up an evocative blend of bookshelves, drawers, equipment, scientific diagrams and equations, and a rural scene with a modern city in the background, upon which more graphic imagery is projected from time to time – all cleverly made prominent or otherwise, as required, by Jennifer Lal’s splendid lighting design. We are in Isaac’s home in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, although he would rather be in London.

Costume designer Sasha Tilly has dressed them in contemporary clothes which are predominantly white, the most significant change being when Catherine comes into her own (or does she?). Along with the actors using their own unadulterated voices, the music of Nelson composer Rhian Sheehan brings it all home.

What Isaac wants most at this point in his life is to be admitted to The Royal Society and he wants Robert Hooke to nominate him. Much has been made of Newton and Hooke being “the Mozart and Salieri of science” and indeed Andrew Paterson’s beautifully nuanced personification of Isaac as a brilliant but self-absorbed precocious prat is wickedly entertaining, especially when he responds wordlessly to audience reactions.

Todd Rippon’s Robert Hooke is astutely crafted to present much more than just a jealous rival. Although his desire to suppress this young talent is clear, there is cogent scientific rigour in the challenges he issues to Isaac. Later, Hooke’s rationalisation of his sex addiction as legitimate scientific enquiry escalates the perversity quotient to perversion – not that he commits the act he cannot help but imagine.

As Catherine, the local apothecary, 10 years older than Isaac but friends with him since childhood, now feeling she is growing even older while Isaac regresses in age, Neenah Dekkers-Reihana brings a well-grounded truth to the play. Her scene-to-scene responses to the self-centred men becomes the most compelling element for me.

Holding it all together, and delivering a poignant portrait of a man called Sam who is dying from the Plague, is Alex Greig. Splendidly dynamic in acquitting himself of the roles, he does launch into it as if intimate Circa Two was the St James but soon settles into a real relationship with us. His ebullience is infectious.

Along with a struggle of science to gain traction in a Bible-fearing nation, there are human foibles, vulnerabilities and moral dilemmas aplenty, culminating in a blackmailing competition, to keep us riveted to Isaac’s Eye as Hnath’s playfulness plays out. What I have yet to see is what it’s about that’s bigger than itself; what Hnath’s greater purpose is in writing this play. But of course he lets himself off the proverbial hook by declaring it’s “full of ether” and riddled with untruths.

So it’s ‘real’ meaning is, I guess, in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps all he has set out to prove is how inexact science can be. However you take it, McLaughlin and co have ensured you’ll be thoroughly engaged for two hours at least.

OTHER REVIEWS

Laurie Atkinson, The Dominion Post, 21 October 2014