There is an extraordinary idea around that if a playwright selects a period of history; highlights (almost as if with one of those garishly luminous pens) various then-living writers, philosophers, scientists and artists; throws in a whole lot of undigested, unilluminating references to their work; adds a little sex and violence; expresses what they might (or rather, almost certainly wouldn't) have said in sententious but banal prose, and injects the whole thing with an enormous sense of self-importance, then he or she has actually written a play that says something vital, new and interesting. Exhibit A of this disastrous illusion was Anthony Sher's the Giant. Now there is also The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes by Adriano Shaplin, a man who, having declared the pointlessness of Shakespeare, has been (quite bafflingly) taken up by the RSC.
      The play opens some time during Cromwell's Protectorate and ends with the Great Fire of London in 1666. Dramatis personae include Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton, whose philosophical and scientific theories are alluded to, and experiments evoked. All of which could be fascinating, but if you felt puzzled or ignorant about these theories before the play, you felt even more so at the end. A whole lot of references to clocks, springs, gases, air pumps, telescopes, microscopes, pamphlets and fossils had been distributed into the mouths of appropriately named characters, and occasionally the articles themselves were produced. But, unfortunately, the assumption that if you refer to various ideas, you have actually expounded and wrestled with them is unfounded. It was as if the playwright had spent a few hours on the internet googling Hobbes, Boyle and Hooke, then written the play on a frightful mixture of speed and cannabis - it managed to be simultaneously manic and slow-moving. Bleary, unworked out themes were frantically tossed into the air, like the scraps of paper that confettied round the restored Charles II at the beginning of Act 2, only to drift pointlessly to earth ('let's present the opposition between rationalism and empiricism' was clearly one bright idea, but the resulting presentation was garbled, silly and wrong). What were you meant to make of it all, what were you meant to feel? Clearly as thrilled as the playwright was with himself and his work, but, though he may have been stoned on his own sense of brilliance, that just left the audience all the more flat, sober and disenchanted.
      Totally lacking in overall pace and drama, the play dragged interminably, although with lots of erratic little escalations of excitement (as when Boyle's demonstration of his experiments in the King's presence is sabotaged by Hobbes and two followers). But these amyl nitrate flurries would then inexplicably die down without any follow-up, leaving you frustrated at how arbitrary, short-lived and inconsequential they had been. Concluding this alienating lack of drama was the miming sequence during the Fire of London (which admittedly has to be blamed on director Elizabeth Freestone rather than on Shaplin). The actors stiltedly stalked the passageways of the multi-levelled set and flung themselves up and down the stairs and scaffolding in what was meant to be nightmare mechanical menace but was actually more like a well-drilled but ultimately embarrassing student ballet.
      Sometimes, despite everything, the play would come alive. Through the staginess, clunky dialogue and bewildering splatter of references would occasionally poke, thanks to the vigour and commitment of the actors, a sense of real people in 17th century London. Jack Laskey as Robert Hooke, and Angus Wright and James Garnon as the out-of-work actors Rotten and Black, transcended actorliness into reality. But these spokes of life only obtruded without being able to wheel the play, because the acting was uneven, sometimes just at committed student level. Amanda Hadingue as Robert Boyle was boring and unconvincing, although very convinced herself. It didn't help that she was playing against gender (why on earth, as stipulated in the text, does Boyle have to be played by a woman anyway?). She also was burdened with some of the worst lines of the play. Sententious and silly prose, it was a mixture of current speech and cod-Shakespeare -- so tin-eared and imprecise as sometimes to be virtually meaningless, as in the debate (presumably a high-point of the play) between Hobbes and Boyle.

Hobbes: What light is here? I see an empty promise on your altar.

Boyle: Your model of dispute is obsolete.

Hobbes: You mean to soothe us with blind hubris.

Boyle: You are the animus man [with any luck, a misprint] inside us all.
    
Et cetera, et cetera. Apparently pregnant with significance, it was just pretentious wind. And Shaplin thought he could outdo Shakespeare - talk about 'blind hubris'!
Jane O'Grady