BRILLIANT! To 24 August.
Edinburgh - Fringe
BRILLIANT! THE BLINDING ENLIGHTENMENT OF NIKOLA TESLA
by Electric Company
Electric Company THeatre at C venue Chambers Street To 24 August
12.30pm
Runs 1hr 30min No interval
TICKETS: 0870 701 5105
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 August
Maybe not quite brilliant, but certainly illuminating.Electric is well-named, assuming the subject of their play is as true as they claim. If not, the whole thing'd be pointless. If true, it's a lesson for me in history and fame. For I've never heard of Nikola Tesla.
Yet this Serbian immigrant to 1884 America out-Edisoned Edison, who filched the new arrival's ideas. Tesla dredged-up in New York the same year as the Statue of Liberty arrived, having already invented alternating current (Edison laughed it off as a scientific impossibility).
Tesla was a scientist, and a creative person. Like some writers and chess-players, the work was done in his head. If he could believe it, he'd invented it. The physical work was easy. Many ideas were never written out, as a security measure. Yet when he died in 1942, the US government apparently confiscated massive documentation, which the play suggests could still be informing defence technology.
Yet he lacked Edison's practicality in dealing with people; nor did Tesla share his rival's publicity flair (Edison put on public demonstrations in a vain effort to rubbish a/c). He had only two loves, his inventions and pigeons. He'd picnic in the park with these birds, taking a particular shine to one, which he fancied reciprocated his interest. When he died iimpoverished in 1942, his apartment was apparently full of the creatures.
As for the inventions, they came along fine so long as he had backers. Wardenclyffe, his Long Island tower set to produce radio while Marconi was still transmitting single letters in morse code, had the rug pulled from under it when J.P. Morgan withdrew financing. So did editor Robert Underwood-Johnson, whose treachery hurt his wife and Tesla (their relation, increasingly warm on her part, may have played a part).
It's no new theme, the man ahead of his time, and at odds with his own day's conventional imaginations. What makes the piece fascinating is its rootedness in reality. Be as brilliant as you will, you can only go so far in a world where credibility and credit are essential fellow-travellers for any distance.
Canada's Electric Company perform adequately. They're a bit over-keen to lighten proceedings by emplying genre-pastiche. A speeded-movement flickery silent-cinema sequence is neatly enough done, without adding much. The musical attempts come off less well.
Jonathon Young's Tesla convincingly seeing the world through his inventive perspective, without becoming a cliched mad scientist, and keeping some sense of social reality with his friends until the (here, less explored) later years.
The sting, though's, in the nowadays tail. This year sees the US Military's HAARP project in action. This aims to improve military communications by pounding the ionosphere with energy. The technology was developed in the eighties by Bernard Eastlund, using Tesla's work. It has the power to alter climatic conditions.
So, if you plan on seeing this show and freak storms prevent it - don't get paranoid. It may well not be the CIA, just the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, once again exploiting his rival's inventions.
Nikola Tesla: Jonathon Young
Katherine Underwood-Johnson
Robert Underwood-Johnson: Kevin Kerr
Thoomas Edison/Voice of the Future: Tim Licata
Director: Electric Company
Designer: Andreas Kahre
Sound: David Hudgins, Electric Company
Music arranger: Bill Costin
Masks: Melody Anderson
Tap coach: Courtney Dobbie
Video DEsign: Amos Hertzman
Costume: Maria Gottler
2003-08-21 11:20:46