Word: einsteins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Robert V. Pound, professor of Physics, has proved a fundamental postulate of Einstein's theory of relativity...
...initial idea for the play could have been mouthed by a New York cab driver: Those atomic scientists are crazy, man; they belong in a nut house. Mad Scientist No. 1 (Hume Cronyn) believes he is Sir Isaac Newton. Mad Scientist No. 2 (George Voskovec) thinks he is Albert Einstein. Mad Scientist No. 3 (Robert Shaw) hears the voice of King Solomon, and occasionally imagines that he is Solomon...
What seems to keep them unhinged in Act I is the sheer lack of anything to do. Newton fiddles with his curly 18th century wig, Einstein saws at his fiddle, while Solomon keeps listening for those voices in his head. The lady hunchback (Jessica Tandy) who manages this loony bin shuffles around like a witch off a broomstick. Her charges all murder their nurses...
...second and concluding act, the audience finds out why. The physicists were merely feigning madness, and the nurses were getting wise to their game. In fact Newton and Einstein are secret agents-for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., respectively-with orders to abduct King Solomon, a peerless physicist from an unnamed third country who has solved "the problem of gravitation." This invites some windy word slinging about how a scientist may best preserve his probity. Solomon convinces his colleagues that they should all stay in the madhouse, because "we physicists have to take back our knowledge." However, in an ironic...
...antics of the early two-reelers to the intense tragicomic ironies of those two flawed masterpieces, Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight. But it is uneven and uncommunicative about his many loves and his vociferous left-wing politics, supplying instead great heaps of anecdotes about his encounters with famous people from Einstein and Gandhi to Pablo Casals, Chou Enlai, and Khrushchev...