Edinburgh Fringe 2025
AETHER
TheatreGoose
Genre: Feminist Theatre, Movement, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Anatomy Lecture Hall at Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
An existential PhD student hunting dark matter, a disillusioned illusionist, a medium with a secret and a murdered mathematician star in the greatest unsolved mystery of the universe. TheatreGoose presents this show about the unknown and our insatiable desire to define it, asking why are we so desperate to know what happens behind the curtain and who gets to decide what lurks there? Part-science lab on the cusp of discovery, part-Victorian seance, part-unauthorised Nobel Prize Ceremony, AETHER explores faith, physics and magic in rich theatrical spectacle.
Review
A show about knowing nothing… and it’s jam packed. For the first few moments, to a backdrop of bright blue light, AETHER dazzles with disembodied voices. It asks us to imagine other possibilities and readies us for all we cannot see or know. They tell us we are in the blue matter, the 5% that is visible. The centre stage microphone moves by itself and we laugh. Our attention now focused on sound, light, and the unseen, AETHER tells us we’ve had ‘time to adjust’ knowing full well that there’ll be no time at all for the next 55 minutes. They begin a dance sequence of quarks, beauty pageant-style (one mysterious quark shimmies coyly, she ‘retired a few billion years ago’, and still doesn’t have a name). The energy doesn’t stop, changes between story strands will fold in together, or be danced. The cast of four at times speak one word each, the divisions between the sub-plots blur as the story speeds towards the end, like a universe. But the play also allows time to stare at the stars, to sit with unknowing, with a thing unfinished or lost. This lightning-quick, clever, feminist, and always entertaining show explores the nature of discovery and human interaction with the universe, which, occasionally, ‘reveals a new secret’.
The play draws out five distinct characters in total- ‘five collisions’ – over the hour. We are first introduced to present day physics student Sophie who is three months from the end of her study, wondering if she’ll discover anything at all, and chatting to her girlfriend about the mathematical permutations that would lead to greatest potential for happiness in their Deliveroo order. She connects to fourth-century Hypatia who teaches men mathematics – deeply learned in Ptolemy’s model of celestial bodies, she passes on received knowledge not for duty, ‘but beauty’. Then there is Florence, the lace-skirted medium with a trio of pipe-smoking Victorian ‘geniuses’ in tow trying to prove her right or wrong. There is Adelaide, a magician’s assistant who became the magician, and toured the world creating daring and dangerous illusions. Lastly arrives Vera, a child prodigy who knew how to wait for discovery.
It is a treat to watch women in science, to see themes of physics, mathematics and philosophy as female. The difficulties suffered on account of gender are given their weight as part of the story but with thoughtful framing – female-ness is not all they have to offer. They are unafraid to mention beauty (naming it explicitly) as a yearning within science and they pick out some traditionally feminine dance and theatre forms to play with this historically male subject. It is done with great confidence and an assured belief that these things belong with this subject, indeed they turn out to be a natural fit.
Frequently, drama can simplify academic ideas in a way that feels unsatisfying – perhaps because conveying information entertainingly to an audience with wildly different starting points is a difficult task, perhaps because writers themselves are often of the arts and humanities persuasion, perhaps because too much information and explanation can go against storytelling conventions. This is an example of theatre-making on an academic subject at its best. Physics and a quest for knowledge are woven into every aspect of the play – the show will fire out information about the Higgs boson in one turn, and then in another sing a song of Sigmas to explain standard deviation and how excited a scientist might be by each categorisation. What is it like to know 600 billion collisions happen every second and we may only experience 12 of them a day? How do each of these characters have purpose within their knowledge? How do they form relationships, be believed, be safe, or be remembered?
The direction, lighting, and staging feel like opening theatre’s bag of tricks in service of the story. The audience arrives at its seats in Summerhall’s Anatomy Lecture Theatre with a slate and marker pen – cast members will leap up into the auditorium when taking part in a lesson. Energising and wonderfully effective, simple effects like an onstage projector, stretches of lace fabric, the colours blue and red, and a floodlight on casters illustrate with variety this complicated story of ultimately knowing nothing, of imagining beauty into existence. The cast ably play multiple roles and fulfil a wide-ranging skill set – each actor sparkles individually and will also merge back into a seamless unit. Hypatia will smile at her own description from the chorus, Florence will flirt with the audience and Adelaide will try to talk straight to her. Vera will remind us of stars and luck and Sophie will carry the thread (and the audience) all the way through – the “Every-Physicist”, if you will. Towards the end, some changeover sequences get so hurried as to feel perfunctory (although it’s going by too fast to really notice), the show would benefit from a little breathing room outside of the strict fringe time-keeping to an hour.
This production holds your attention – I noticed the audience even looking up at the ceiling when the cast did. The excellent ensemble and movement work utilising every part of the stage and so many aspects of craft bring the audience in close. The pull feels fitting for this play about existing amidst “everything” – the chaos, exhaustion, violence, stillness, and beauty of the universe.
