On Wednesday 30th October, the Performance and Community REG hosted a rehearsed reading of Box, by Gill Kirk www.gillkirk.com. Gill was accompanied by a fantastically experienced team consisting of Director Hannah Drake (www.hannahdrakedirector.com) and actors Matt Lloyd Davies (www.matthewlloyddavies.com) and Mary Chater (www.shakespeareinitaly.eu). Here’s a little about the play itself:

“In BOX, Allie and Mike’s parallel lives collide and ricochet to give us a 360-degree sense of not just who they are, but who they could be, given the right (and wrong) circumstances. Tales of love, ambition, disappointment and elephants hang like socks on the washing line of Allie’s brilliant, upsetting, weird and wistful TED talk, as she stumbles around the questions of quantum physics, who we are and who we could be.”

Like work such as Carl Djerassi’s Calculus or Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, Box is an example of ‘Science-in-Theatre’, a work equally committed to exploring the intricates and methodologies of science and its epistemological foundations, as well as seeing scientific theories as having a poetic and symbolic analogue in human lives. In Box, ideas of quantum entanglement and the familiar ‘dead-and-not-dead’ cat of Schrodinger are used to discuss the how ‘entanglement’ and uncertainty exist on the macro and the micro levels and how the particular so often speaks to the general.

 

After the performance, we had an illuminating Q&A with Gill and Hannah. We discussed the interface between science and art, as well as the narrative dynamics of non-linear storytelling. This was particularly interesting in the case of Box as rather than being simply non-linear, it was multiply non-linear, exploring as it did the multiple possible lives of the two main characters, Allie and Mike.

 

Dr Craig Jordan-Baker

Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing

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