A one-man-play play making its UK debut reveals Albert Einstein as you have never seen him before. Not as a 20th century titan but as a dad battling to save his relationship with his ten-year-old son; as a science wunderkind celebrated for his game-changing “miracle papers” published in 1905 and as a Jew who was nearly hounded out of Berlin University because of antisemitism during the First World War. It also shows him as a physicist who was nearly driven mad by attempts to deny him the credit for his work.
Conceived, written and performed by American actor Jack Fry, Einstein! A Genius in Tumultuous Times reveals a period of the physicist’s life about which little was known until decades after he died in 1955 at the age of 76.
“Everyone’s familiar with the lovable old man,” explains Fry. “But my play is a take on an earlier period of his life. I focus on the seven-year period from age of 35 to 42 when he was trying to prove relativity. It was a hugely stressful period during which he suffered antisemitism, plagiarism and was also trying to hold on to the relationship he had with his oldest son, ten-year-old Hans,” continues Fry on a video call from his home in Santa Monica.
First seen during a public reading in 2012, the work now can claim to be the longest-running solo show in Los Angeles, a record which will have to be paused when Fry brings his play to west London’s The Playground Theatre on September 8.
The play is the result of two years of research during which Fry immersed himself in documents that the world only had access to since The Hebrew University made them available in 2007. They shed new light on Einstein’s early life, his struggles and the years in Berlin during the First World War.
“No one really knew Einstein’s early life because when he died in 1955 his will bequeathed all his journals, artefacts and notes to The Hebrew University,” explains Fry. “An Israeli guard literally came in, put everything in a box and shipped it out to Israel.”
According to Fry, The Hebrew University would release “a little bit more information from their archive every 10 years.
“It wasn’t until the 1980s that it was publicly known that he was married to Mileva Marić, which is astonishing. My play tells Einstein’s story before he became the figure with the bushy moustache, crazy hair and that romantic look in his eyes that seemed to suggest he was thinking about time and space or something. I’m interested in the stressful part of his life that came before that. The struggle to prove his theory of relativity took 15 years, although my play covers the period in which he realises his calculations are wrong only then to discover that he had the real answer all the time.”
Aside from conveying Einstein’s capacity to out-think his fellow humans, Fry’s objective is to show the brilliant physicist’s humanity.
“He was raised an Orthodox Jew but at the age of ten or 11 he dismissed religion. He always felt the plight of his fellow Jews and was himself persecuted for being one. But my play goes from 1915 to 1925 up until he wins the Nobel Prize. So antisemitism was growing, but not yet at the level he suffered when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He saw the writing on the wall and got out.”
Still, even in the period covered by Fry’s play there was plenty of antisemitism to make life uncomfortable for Einstein. One of his peers, the Hungarian-German theoretical physicist Philipp Lenard who received the Nobel Prize for his work on cathode rays, was “a huge antisemite”, says Fry.
“At Berlin University Einstein was the youngest academic there. And although he had been invited to the university because of his “miracle papers”, he came up against huge amounts of prejudice at the university.”
For his part, Lenard dismissed Einstein’s theories as “Jewish science”.
“He was Einstein’s hero when he was growing up. The irony is that although Lenard tried to destroy Einstein’s already huge reputation, Einstein would win his Nobel not for his work on relativity but for understanding Lenard’s work better than he did.”
After 12 years performing the show, can Fry say that he understands Einstein’s theories better than most of us?
“I have an armchair understanding,” says the actor. “I always have to remind people that I’m an actor playing Einstein. I was always artistic. At school I was never advanced in mathematics or physics. However, I have learnt so much, I am doing a Q&A session with the audience after each show. What’s important is that I communicate this story in way that tells the audience what kind of human he really was.”
Fry’s show deploys 3D effects to convey some of the complex ideas in its subject’s mind. Although as the show attempts to convey there are few things more complex than trying to be a decent dad. “Many of his struggles are our struggles,” says Fry. “Like everyone else, Einstein was trying to get through the day.”
Einstein! A Genius in Tumultuous Times is at The Playground Theatre from September 8 to September 13
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