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Staging the Scientist: The Representation of Science and its Processes in American and British Drama
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Autores
Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that drama, performance and
science are naturally interconnected. Various plays introduce science into their
dramatic content, structure and performance by means of different dramaturgical
strategies, and the objective of this dissertation is to present this diversification of
science plays. In this dissertation I discuss three different representational strategies of
science in recent American and English plays. My corpus includes: Copenhagen (1998)
by Michael Frayn, Photograph 51 (2008) by Ana Ziegler, and Mnemonic (1999) devised
by Complicite company, and conceived and directed by Simon McBurney. Copenhagen
is a metatheatrical play that demonstrates complicated science in an attractive and
accessible way for the audience/readers. It tells a story about Heisenberg, Bohr and his
wife Margrethe who meet after their death in the vague, spirit world to talk about
what happened in Copenhagen in 1941. Photograph 51 stages the competition
between four prominent scientists to discover the double helix of DNA structure, and it
captures the psychological portrait of Rosalind Franklin, who contributed greatly to the
DNA structure discovery. Mnemonic is the “alternative” or “postdramatic” science play
that stages two parallel stories: The journey of Welsh-Lithuanian Alice, a contemporary
woman, who mysteriously left her boyfriend Virgil to look for her never seen father in
Eastern Europe; and the 1991 discovery of the Iceman, a frozen body found in the
Northern Italian Alps that thought to be more than five thousand years old. These two
stories function within a third, bigger narrative, which is about private and cultural
recollections.
The analyses of these science plays are based on the common research
questions: How are science, scientific process or scientist presented in the plays? What
is the role of this representation? How do the plays rework conventional paradigms of
perception of science and how do they reveal the nature of the scientific process? How
are real facts transformed in the plays? What is the role of this transformation? What
is the nature of performance in each play and how it is related to the dramatic
content? Is the scientist the tragic hero and if so, what is the tragic conflict? And finally
what is the structure of the play, what literary conventions does each play rework and
what dramaturgical strategies and choices they operate?
Descrição
Dissertação apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção
do grau de Mestre em Estudos Ingleses e Norte Americanos
Palavras-chave
Performance Science Drama Science play Theatre
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Editora
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa