The Blind Astronomer

Does the life of a man relate to that of a star? _Going Dark _tells the history of the universe as the story of how we perceive it, creating a deeply human, emotional and immersive piece of theatre.

The play is centred round the life of Max, a planetarium astronomer, who gradually loses his sight due to Retinitis Pigmentosa. His ability to work decreases, his relationship with his young son changes, and his identity as an individual is altered and questioned. Sound&Fury, a collaborative theatre company, have created with _Going Dark _a startlingly immersive experience, allowing the audience to enter the heart of the developing Solar System, the mind of a blind man and the emotions of a child.

After its first UK tour last year, _Going Dark _is returning to London with a run at the Science Museum. I interviewed the co-founder of Sound&Fury, Tom Espiner, to find out how _Going Dark _came to life and what the link between art and science is, and might become.

How did the idea for the play come about? How did the link between going blind and space discovery emerge?

It’s an idea which had been on our minds for a long time. There were several impulses but one of the first ones was a real attraction for the building of a planetarium: it’s a tool for education and helps our scientific understanding of the universe, but it’s also a sort of secular temple, an intimate environment in which a lot of self-reflection happens. You’re confronted with the infinite, the very large, the wonderful.

We were also really interested in the idea of bringing together light, sound and darkness, all key elements of a planetarium and of our own work. Because of our previous interest in darkness we wanted to create a play about the senses and our perceptions, particularly the hindering of visual perception.

We also started to find that there were some interesting parallels between the way in which we, as a human race over millennia, have seen and understood celestial objects, the scale of the universe, and the dynamics of light, with how we relate to what we see in the world around us: a correlation between cosmological understanding and our own understanding of our daily lives as we interact with the world. So: life through the eye and universe through the telescope.

How much of your play is based on scientific research?

It started with late Prof Richard Gregory of the University of Bristol, a neuropsychologist who spent his whole life studying the relationship between the brain and the eye, and optical illusions. He’d come to see one of our previous plays and was really interested in how in the dark we could create images and sensations in our mind’s eye.

I also did a residency with Birmingham Physics and Astronomy department for nine months, speaking to various astronomers and physicists. As I was exploring what they were doing there I became naturally interested in how vision works, and how so much of the universe that we now understand and study does not rely on sight alone, using instrumentation that sees wavelengths that we don’t. I guess for anyone who does science that’s just par for the course, but it’s still a very wonderful thing to explore and present to an audience.

We were funded by the Wellcome Foundation to work with experts in their field: we approached Dr Fitch, a psychiatrist specialising in visual consciousness and the hallucinations often brought on by loss of sight (Charles Bonnet syndrome), elements which were incorporated in our play. We also spoke to RP Fighting Blindness, who gave us insights into the details of going blind. Research is, and always has been, a major part of our work.

To what extent to you think that the increasing public availability to scientific knowledge is making people blind to its wonders?

We have a plethora of science communicators nowadays: I grew up with Carl Sagan, who for me was one of the best science communicators ever, and of course Brian Cox is all over the place – instilling wonder for anyone who wants to see him on TV.

Initially we thought we could get an astronomer to give a talk at the Young Vic: the scientist as showman is a well-established model and it’s great to see that, from Humphrey Davy on, that tradition is alive and well. But we wanted to take a step in a different direction: we wanted a human element. Theatre is, as well as a place to educate, a place of stories and a place of emotions, and we wanted to meet that challenge.

It’s very difficult to achieve this, but we wanted to intertwine a compelling story with some good hard core science facts, and finding a way in which they could relate to each other. And when you do that, you draw together audiences which wouldn’t usually be together, all in the same room, sharing a story and getting different things out of it.

There’s almost a tendency for scientists to become part of a sort of exclusive priesthood: they’re in a group of people who, thanks to years of study, can understand things in great detail, and come to see great beauty which often can’t be explained to others, as a lot of mathematical knowledge is needed to appreciate it. So it’s really important that people try to communicate that by finding the right type of metaphor or language to enlighten us.

Dr Francisco Diego, vice president of the UK Association for Astronomy Education gave one of the post-show talks and said that in our character we had created someone who instilled wonder like the old-school communicators did – a style of science communication which just isn’t around as much anymore. Which is a shame: evoking wonder and excitement about science is a powerful tool.

Could _Going Dark _be a good model for Science Communication in the future? Or was this a one off instance of science reflecting the human story you wanted to convey?

I believe that the story comes first and foremost, and there must be plausibility in the emotional story. I think it’s a very good way of bringing science understanding into the public domain, but it’s hard to achieve – a balancing act. Audiences are smart and they will pick up on something being didactically rammed down their throat. I do think one should strive to bring art and theatre together with science.

_Going Dark _has been described as “an Imax without the pictures”, as it is an incredibly immersive experience thanks to the sounds and minimal lighting you use. How much does your work rely on advances in technology?

Ever since we started we’ve wanted to push the boundaries of the technological elements of theatre – partly because technology is getting better all the time. It has to be used with caution as you can easily overdose; once again, the core elements of a good story are essential. The more refined and delicate you can be with sound and light, the more detail you can bring out.

Some people have described our work as immersive theatre: the sound is spatialised and massive so that the audience is actually plunged sonically into the scene, and we conjure up a sense of place, shared by audience and actors at the same time. Our sound designer, Dan Jones, has really studied how to achieve exactly the right reverb, harnessing the audience’s imagination and transporting them to the scenes; all the technology we use is there to serve the story. We would like our audience to think “I was really there”, not to think “that sound technology was excellent!”

Going Dark will be performed at the performance space of the Science Museum from 5th-9th March 2013. Tickets are £20 for adults, £8 for students, and are available from the Science Museum website.