The Element in the Room

Marie Curie’s story is a tale of of glowing powders with extraordinary powers, lives saved and destroyed, and unparalleled achievements in the face of unbelievable odds. Featuring incredible scientific breakthroughs, comedy songs and an audience-participation radioactive decay chain, this is an exuberant and moving retelling of Marie’s real-life journey across the USA to collect a single gram of radium and a celebration of the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, whose work continues to affect our lives today.

Cast

John Hinton (Marie Curie and all other characters), Jo Eagle (Pierre Curie and Accordion)

Creative Team

Daniel Goldman (Director), John Hinton (Text, Music and lyrics), Jo Eagle (Music and lyrics)

Once we’d decided to complete the trilogy, we knew we wanted to celebrate a woman scientist, especially with numbers down amongst young girls studying science and the world of science being, in general, male-dominated. After some research, we realised we really wanted to tell the story of Marie Curie, given her status in the science world and the fascinating life that she led. The problem of course was that John is a man and we that meant that we knew we’d have to address the very valid question – if you’re going to celebrate a woman scientist, why have a man play her. Of course, for us, it had to be John and it had to be Marie. And so we decided a dual approach.

The first was to think deeply about what we were doing and answer the question head on in the show itself. The result was that first song in the show addresses the question and invites the audience to suspend their disbelief and accept that our hearts are in the right place.

The second approach was for Jo to play Pierre Curie. Jo had originally come into our Einstein show as an accompanist on piano but the original idea was that after an original run in Edinburgh, we would tour and work with local musicians everywhere else we went. However, Jo proved herself to be such a wonderful, beautifully nuanced actress in that show that we made her role much bigger, and when it came to The Element in the Room, we all wanted to make Jo a bigger part of the show. The idea that emerged organically was that she would play Pierre to John’s Marie. It immediately gave the show a lovely balance, and as we made the show, we found more and more opportunities to develop Pierre’s character and therefore Marie’s relationship with him. In the end, it became the heart of the play, and the play was the better for it.

And what did we learn? Allowing an existential problem to exist right from the outset led us to exciting discoveries and to make a completely original piece of work.