REVIEW: Synchronicity by Arthur I. Miller at White Bear Theatre 19 - 30 November 2024

Photography: Dawson James

“Technically I am not Jewish but I am classed as 75 per cent Jewish by the Nazis.” – Wolfgang Pauli. ★★★

The White Bear’s audiences may be swelled this month by folk who look quickly at the posters and think they are being offered a lesser-known piece from the author of Death of a Salesman. But no: this is Arthur I. Miller, a distinguished American academic who was once Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, where he founded the Department of Science and Technology Studies. 

And as you might expect, what his play Synchronicity lacks in his namesake’s famous stagecraft, it makes up in erudition. It really is a remarkably learned play. I sometimes wondered why I was the only person in the audience taking notes. Did the others not realise they would be examined in this stuff at the end of the year?

The play is about the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), one of the pioneers of quantum physics, visiting psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and how the therapy sessions gradually evolved into seminars, and helped produce the so-called Pauli principle. I shall not attempt to tell you what that is, because I would probably get it wrong. My notes from last night are not that good. The play, says the publicity, is about “psychology, physics, alchemy and the extraordinary things that can happen when two brilliant minds meet”, and I expect it is, but plays are supposed to be about people.

Erudition in the theatre, in principle, is a good thing. But naked erudition – erudition without theatricality – is less good. There were a few moments when I thought I was in a lecture theatre. Those moments did not last too long, fortunately. This is, in the end, a proper piece of theatre, in which real people, whom you care about and sympathise with, change and evolve, and end the evening in a radically different place from where they started. Professor Miller does understand the difference between a theatre and a lecture theatre. It’s just that, from time to time, he forgets. 

He is helped by two excellent actors. Stephen Riddle makes a charming, enigmatic Jung, and Jeremy Drakes a believably tense and unhappy Pauli. Anthony Shrubsall’s direction makes the most of the tiny stage space at the Whie Bear, and Male Arcucci’s set is a clever mixture of mathematical symbols and shapes.

The lighting plot needs attention. The device of lowering the lighting for the occasional internal monologue works well enough, and may be the best that could be done in that space, but every so often they shone a light in the face of the section of the audience in which I was sitting, for no apparent reason. I wished they wouldn’t.

Synchronicity by Arthur I. Miller is at the White Bear Theatre from 19-30 November. Tickets from https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/

Reviewer Francis Beckett is a playwright, author and journalist. His latest play is Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You.