Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1900), the German Swiss playwright, was a key figure in post-war theatre and is probably best known in England for his masterpiece, The Visit (1956). The Physicists, which premiered in Zurich in 1962 and was staged by the RSC the following year in a production by Peter Brook, is a classic example of the absurdist theatre and has all the trappings of farce. The farce, however, is political and deadly serious. It was written during the Cold War era when there was a very real possibility of an all-out nuclear war and the destruction of the whole planet. Physicists had become the perpetrators of mass extinction and for many of them the moral responsibility of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been too much.
The patients in a private mental sanatorium are killing the nurses. One patient thinks he is Sir Isaac Newton, another thinks he is Albert Einstein and a third thinks he is in communication with King Solomon. But are they really mad? Or are they just pretending to be mad? How sane is the hunchbacked director of the sanatorium, played by Sophie Thompson in another of her OTT performances?
John Heffernan, a wise inmate, has the key speech when he delivers Dürrenmatt’s argument that it would be much safer to keep all physicists in the madhouse, where they could continue their research and never publish their findings, rather than let them loose and turn the world into a madhouse.
Josie Rourke’s sharp production is set in a brightly lit and clinically white area whose tall back wall is a mass of doors. 60 years on, the satire, inevitably, is dated and no longer has the impact it once had. The farce is not as funny as it used to be; but Justin Salinger, very stylish and witty as Newton, looks like he might be the perfect actor for Restoration Comedy.