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Albert Einstein: Relativitively Speaking
Published on Thursday, 16 May 2013
3

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3 stars

The Nightingale (venue website)
Theatre
5, 12, 19, 26 May, 5:00pm-6:00pm
Reviewed by Mathilda Gregory
 World Premiere.
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This year, John Hinton is Albert Einstein. The versatile Brighton-based performer – who has also created shows about Darwin, Norse Gods and Alien Rock Stars – is taking on one of his most heavyweight icons yet. This show is still in preview; in fact, the performance I saw was its first-ever outing, and that needs to be taken into consideration. However, it really did lack the magic of Hinton’s earlier appearances.

A second opinion

By Richard Stamp on 22 May 2013

What a difference a couple of weeks can make.  Dropping in on Relativitively Speaking later in its run, I found a faster-paced piece, which did come close to achieving the energy familiar from Hinton’s earlier shows.  I enjoyed it, and I think the audience around me enjoyed it too.

My first love is drama, not comedy, so the crashing mood change when Albert is confronted with the reality of the A-bomb worked surprisingly well for me.  But I did feel that, after crashing, it dragged along the bottom; to me, the real problem is that show took a long time to finish.

And that points to a fundamental issue, which I think lies at the heart of both my reaction and Mathilda’s.  I’m not quite sure who this show is aimed at: the upbeat opening sets it up for all the family, but there’s little for the kids in its lengthy, dark conclusion.

I’d also be tempted to drop some of the science, especially if that made room for another song.  Because it’s the songs that make Hinton’s shows great.  But, overall, I think this show’s developing in the right direction, and I’ll be interested so see what it’s like by the time it arrives in Edinburgh.

His science explanations were good, but the extensive audience participation could be quite hit and miss. A huge hit was the night’s best song, a rap about E=MC squared, with the crowd encouraged to spell out the equation using gangster rap hand gestures (‘Eastside’ for E). It was far, far better than it sounds on paper. But there were too many misses. Thought experiments that explained special relativity with knowing banter about ‘Imagine you are walking along and you see a pretty girl…’ were like being a science lesson with a teacher who thinks he’s funny, and isn’t.

The timeline of the show is also confusing.  There is a framing device of Einstein delivering his first lecture at Princeton, just before WW2, and the device of Hinton throwing talc over himself to get greyer hair as Einstein gets older is funny. But the chronology of the story jumps everywhere.

Later emotional sequences, when Einstein has to witness the devastation his discoveries bring at the end of the war, are completely at odds with the rest of the show. A devastated Einstein was hard to reconcile with the character we’d been watching, and this particular sequence overbalanced the whole thing. The show never really recovered from how much this jars.

The reason the rap song is so good, is that Hinton bursts into life when he performs it. And the reason much of the rest of the show doesn’t work is because it feels so low energy. It’s ironic, given that this show is about a famous equation that proved just how much energy matter contained.

Shows about science never quite seem to work if they are trying to be about the science and about the characters. This show tries to do both, and despite flashes of brilliance, never really pulls it together.
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