Writer: Heather Massie
Directors: Blake Walton and Leslie Kincaid Burby
Heather Massie’s one-woman show, HEDY! The Life & Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, aims to do what it says on the tin. A quick glimpse of Lamarr’s Wikipedia entry gives you the outline. Born in Vienna, she does indeed become a successful Hollywood movie star, promoted by Louis B Meyer as ‘the world’s most beautiful woman’. And, wonderfully strangely, she was also an inventor, getting a patent for a device to stop enemy attempts to jam radio signals controlling torpedoes.
But biographical facts alone don’t create drama and the show lacks the necessary alchemy to draw us into Lamarr’s story. There is simply too much clunky exposition, along the lines of ‘You’re phoning for an interview? You’d like to know what happened after my Hollywood career stalled?’ Massie gives the hordes of men in Lamarr’s life walk-on parts, playing them for the most part in similar vein – cigar-smoking, side-mouth-talking, splayed-legged sexists. What an audience longs to know is what she was like beneath the glamorous exterior. There are many instances of her using her looks to extract favours, famously raising money for war bonds by selling kisses. Just how manipulative was she? To be more frank, did she basically sell herself?
What did her ex-husbands have to say about her? If she had friends, and we learn about very few, what did they think of her? She adopted one son, then gave birth to another (cue phone call to Betty Gable so this birth can be announced). But Massie steers clear of her 50-year estrangement from the older son.
So we get no glimpse at all of the dark side of her personality. Her distancing herself from her Jewish ethnicity is supposedly explained by her occasional sentimental thoughts about Jewish suffering under the Nazis. There is a particularly egregious part where she rhapsodies about the beauty of the word ‘Kristallnacht’ before solemnly explaining to us what it actually refers to. Beyond this, we never find out what makes her tick, never see her mask slip.
It’s a pity Massie is a stranger to irony, or her character’s increasingly inflated claims for her inventions would be funny. She claims that if only Lamarr’s radio-wave jammer had been adopted by the US Navy, WW2 might have had a happier outcome.
Runs until 13 July 2024