Writer: Jack Fry
Director: Tom Blomquist
A top-hatted Albert Einstein returns from beyond the grave to deliver a post-mortem review of his early trials and tribulations in Jack Fry’s single-hander, Einstein! A Genius in Tumultuous Times. The piece promises tension, charting a high-stakes intellectual race to complete the theory of general relativity. Yet clunky dialogue, an overload of detail, and a larger-than-life characterisation ultimately obscure the subtlety beneath the equations.
The reincarnated physicist returns to his Berlin office in 1914, where he waits anxiously for news of an expedition to photograph a solar eclipse, the findings of which could prove or dismantle his life’s work. He sets the scene with a blunt dose of exposition: “I was broke and had two children and Germany had declared war on Europe.”
What follows is a by-the-book bioplay convergence of professional and personal strife. German mathematician David Hilbert is hot on his heels to publish the definitive equations first, while Einstein schemes to divorce his wife, Mileva, to marry his cousin Elsa – promising his future Nobel Prize purse to Mileva if she signs the papers. “We’ll never cohabit, capitulate or copulate again,” he announces. Battling institutional anti-Semitism, theoretical dead ends, and establishment sneers at “the smell of Jewish science”, the physicist eventually triumphs, though the journey is a bumpy one.
Fry plays Einstein as a sweating, frazzled-haired mash-up of Boris Johnson, actor Robin Williams, TV’s Frasier, and Back to the Future’s Doc Brown. He is variously angry, scheming, and self-righteous, armed with a whimpering, tempestuous self-regard that frequently verges on the histrionic. “God, what I went through,” he moans self-servingly. Of his intellect, he laments, “This is not a gift. It’s a leviathan that’s taken over my soul.”
Fry’s Einstein is certainly a striking characterisation from a writer-performer who spent three years researching his subject. Yet one struggles to reconcile the image of a man “doing a rhumba with destiny and a cha-cha-cha with change” with what one thought one knew about Einstein, or indeed to muster much sympathy for him. Perhaps that is deliberate. As Einstein helpfully, if not humbly, reminds us, “even Jesus had a temper”.
Fry also delivers a carousel of subsidiary figures, from Einstein’s whining near-estranged son Hans to scientific rivals and a Cambridge astronomy professor, all rendered in broad, cod-Austrian accents. Tracking who is who proves tricky, a confusion only partially mitigated by back projections showing time and place, and fourth-wall-breaking audience patter. Toss in an earnest stab at explaining relativity alongside reflections on deism, and the piece becomes rather over-stuffed. Fry clearly knows his onions, but the details and the surfeit of characters too often crowd out the drama.
Runs until 13 September 2026
