Review: Aether, Jermyn Street Theatre

A smash hit at Edinburgh Fringe last year, theatregoose’s Aether has a welcome run at Jermyn Street Theatre. It opens with four particles speaking from disembodied voices setting the scene. They promise to tell us five stories to help us make a leap of imagination, before they join us on stage, coming from behind the blue velvet curtain of the larger universe and into the part of the universe that we can see ourselves. Written and directed by Emma Howlett, Aether is very much idea-driven theatre. 

This play really demands you pay attention and is prepared to throw some scientific concepts at you. Aether may talk about dark matter and the Higgs Boson, but it will help you along the way, with an early highlight being Vaudevillian chant to explain standard deviation. There’s a sense of a play crossed with a scientific lecture at times: the audience are students learning along, with one small but lovely moment where we have whiteboards and pens to contribute to a lecture. 

Sophie (Sophie Kean), a PhD student, faces a fork in the road, unsure if she wants to continue with her studies. Through four interwoven stories crossing centuries, we learn about women who have wrestled with the same questions of purpose and recognition. The cast multi-role through time and space, and Gemma Barnett shines as early Egyptian mathematician Hypatia in one of the strongest stories, elegantly presented. As the five worlds overlap, science, ambition and identity become inseparable in a field where women are often unseen

Holding the story together is Sophie and girlfriend (Anna Marks Pryce), Sophie’s search for knowledge sees her wanting to bring everything out into the light, while her girlfriend argues there is beauty in the unknown. Their different approaches are beautifully set in place by a back and forth over what food to order for the evening, a seemingly trivial exchange but one that shows the differences so easily. Sophie wants a rigorous plan to get the right choice for the order and her girlfriend just wants some tasty food to show up. Everything is a problem to be solved for Sophie. The wit and warmth in Howlett’s script is on full display here – the humour isn’t forced, it doesn’t require a PhD to follow and there is space for it to fit in between denser scientific and historical ideas.

Howlett’s direction keeps the story moving along neatly and scenes are interspersed with the particles dancing or moving each other into new positions, bringing moments of lightness and fun.  

Ellie Wintour’s set is almost empty, meaning the dark space (lit by Ed Saunders) keeps our focus on the performers and the idea rather than any realism. It allows the abstract ideas to feel immediate and despite some of the immense concepts, they can almost feel intimate. An old-fashioned overhead projector is used for captions, titles of scenes and occasional equations I think, but unfortunately on the surface of the blue curtain, they were completely illegible. It’s put to better use later as the light differentiates the paths Sophie is pulled upon, but the strongest use is to illustrate Plato’s allegory of the cave 

Aether brings a sense of wonder that the universe is so large, we are so small and we know so little: there is so much left for us to discover. This isn’t without cost, the search for knowledge and for breakthrough coming at a price, with Hypatia murdered in the street, Vera Rubin, snubbed for the Nobel Prize and Adelaide Herrmann, outdoing contemporary magicians but her name becoming lost to history. Aether left me thinking about how vast the universe is, how little I know, but how gently and sincerely theatregoose describes the wonder of the search.

Written and directed by Emma Howlett
Set and Costume Design by Ellie Wintour
Lighting Design by Ed Saunders
Composer and Sound Design by Sarah Spencer

Aether plays at Jermyn Street Theatre until Saturday 4 April.