Life's a Monkey

Life's a Monkey
Cochrane Theatre, London

Shirley Dent

…and what a great performance from the monkey!
…and I am left thoroughly bemused!

Let me justify those statements. Life's a Monkey is a drama conceived around particle physics, cold war politics and, vaguely, vaguely, vaguely the two cultures debate. Science clashes with Art - but not in the world of particle physics - or so it would seem when the 2005 Nobel Prize winner gets by with the help of a monkey and performance artists (and yes, the monkey wins hands down on the art front).

The publicity material tells us that Life's a Monkey was made possible by a grant from the European Community's European Science and Technology week fund, in conjunction with the London Institute, and is the result of a three year collaboration between the writers, Ken McMullen and Michael Benson, and scientists and technicians working at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research).

Well, okay, so far so good. At the centre of the puzzle of this play (and puzzling it certainly is) is the search for the mysterious Higgs Boson, the 'God' particle lurking at the beginning of creation that if discovered will kick conventional physics into orbit, so to speak.

And that's the problem with this work as drama: things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

I am not a physicist, particle or quantum or anything else. I judge this work as a play. And as a play - well, it isn't. It's a rumination on 'infinite possibilities', on art as science, and science as art. There is a little lecturing on atomic physics thrown in (the monkey was great here, I think I even spotted a forward roll). Then there's some shenanigans with the Soviets. The maverick American chaotitian who eventually wins the Nobel prize with monkey's help has a line at the start of the play that I hoped would be followed through: 'Light, comrades, is a kiss on a soviet tram. The number 53 to be exact'. My instinct for dramatic narrative - I'm kinda conventional like that - was alert to this, as there is something wonderful and engaging in the story of science as a human activity carried out by humans operating in specific social and political contexts. The story of science during the cold war years has the potential to make a really exciting play.

But herein lies the real problem. There is no dramatic tension in any of this. I didn't believe the intense love affair between the American Max Charman and Ophelia, the mysterious artiste. I couldn't have cared less for the scientists gathered together to discuss how close they are to discovering the Higgs Boson particle - although I was drawn into the projected names of scientists through the ages and the chalkboard writing of their equations. This is not because the actors were terrible - they looked good, the set looked great - but because the parts are not written as characters but as cyphers of particle physics. That is turning both art and science on its head. It is not particle physics that maketh the man, but man that maketh the particle physics. Max's' suggestion as he cuddles monkey that 'Everything we thought we are, we are not' is phoney profundity.

What holds the centre together, in art or science, is humanity: sorry, monkey.