Reviewed Wednesday 12th February 2014
The last time that John Hinton appeared in Adelaide, he played Charles Darwin. This time he portrays Albert Einstein, beginning in 1933 as he gives his inaugural lecture at Princeton. He is ably assisted during the performance by his mother, first wife, and second wife, who also happens to be his cousin, all of whom look remarkably similar. The multi-instrumentalist music teacher, Jo Eagle, plays these three every influential and important women in Einstein's life but, more importantly again, she plays the keyboard. Yes, it is the all singing, all dancing, Albert Einstein Show.
Albert Einstein: Relativitively Speaking is deliberately misspelled, not a mistake. As the title implies, though, that inaugural lecture covered his special theory of relativity. To explain 'inertial frames of reference', the first pair of audience volunteers were drawn to the stage and , although explaining a serious scientific context for studying bodies in motion, much hilarity ensued, as it did on further occasions when volunteers assisted as visual aids. One may ask what this means to the man in the street and, interestingly that is very person to whom it is relevant, since that theory of relativity is the basis of the GPS system that many drivers now rely on.
His best known equation, E=MC2 is not missed out, but is presented as a rap number, with hand gestures that are mirrored by the audience. A rapper, with talcum powder whitened hair that looks like it was attacked by a Van De Graaf generator, and a moustache that almost has a life of its own, is a sight to behold. Don't let the musical numbers and the comedy fool you, though. Hinton knows his stuff when it comes to the science, and he explains it in an easily understandable way.
It is not all about black holes, light changing direction when affected by a strong gravitation field, or the duality of wave/particle motion. Einstein's life gets plenty of coverage and there is the poignant moment when he realises that he has inadvertently become what he hated. Nobel invented dynamite, and the incongruity of the Nobel Peace Prize is not overlooked. Einstein was a pacifist. Imagine his dilemma when he discovers that his equation, E=MC2, had pointed the way to creating the atomic bombs that were to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When a critical mass of a radioactive substance is reached, a small mass of that substance is converted to an enormous amount of radioactive energy, with a massive force. He had become another Nobel, but millions of times worse.
That moment, though, soon passes and the bulk of the performance is full of fun, laughter music and comedy, helped a lot in this performance by the attendance of very enthusiastic high school drama students, who were to write reviews, and first year drama students from the Adelaide Centre for the Arts, who raced to get to the stage whenever volunteers were requested. Holden Street Theatres, who are hosting the production, have made yet another good choice in bringing this to the Fringe and will, I am sure, get big audiences.
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