Theater: Swiss Cheese

The Physicists opens with a corpse stretched out on the stage, and the play promptly follows suit. The setting is a sanitarium for the insane, but the chief delusion of the evening is harbored by Swiss Playwright Friedrich Duerrenmatt (The Visit), who plainly believes that he is a deep thinker. He dispenses fat, fuzzy thoughts on atomic scientists, moral responsibility, and the apocalyptic menace of the bomb as if he were imparting profound revelations rather than portentous bromides.

The initial idea for the play could have been mouthed by a New York cab driver: Those atomic scientists are crazy, man; they belong in a nut house. Mad Scientist No. 1 (Hume Cronyn) believes he is Sir Isaac Newton. Mad Scientist No. 2 (George Voskovec) thinks he is Albert Einstein. Mad Scientist No. 3 (Robert Shaw) hears the voice of King Solomon, and occasionally imagines that he is Solomon.

What seems to keep them unhinged in Act I is the sheer lack of anything to do. Newton fiddles with his curly 18th century wig, Einstein saws at his fiddle, while Solomon keeps listening for those voices in his head. The lady hunchback (Jessica Tandy) who manages this loony bin shuffles around like a witch off a broomstick. Her charges all murder their nurses.

In the second and concluding act, the audience finds out why. The physicists were merely feigning madness, and the nurses were getting wise to their game. In fact Newton and Einstein are secret agents—for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., respectively—with orders to abduct King Solomon, a peerless physicist from an unnamed third country who has solved “the problem of gravitation.” This invites some windy word slinging about how a scientist may best preserve his probity. Solomon convinces his colleagues that they should all stay in the madhouse, because “we physicists have to take back our knowledge.” However, in an ironic finale that negates their decision, the scientists discover that “anything that is once thought cannot be unthought.”

Duerrenmatt’s che sera sera fatalism is colored by a little wit, less eloquence, and the kind of oracular vision that informs playgoers that the work of atomic scientists might doom the human race. Cronyn, Tandy, Voskovec and, most especially, Robert Shaw, perform with the unerring precision of fine Swiss watches, but they are sealed in an intellectual Swiss cheese.