num_pages: 80
description: Melodrama / Characters: 16 male, 4 femaleScenic Requirements: InteriorThe scene is a madhouse and the focus is on three inmates who are nuclear physicists. One thinks he is Newton and another, Einstein. The third has visitations from Solomon. They appear to be nice, likeable lunatics, but nothing is as simple as it seems. Are they really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game with the world as the stake? Who is earnest and who is the spy? Gradually we learn that each has been led down the path to moral destruction, past the signposts of truth, the purity of science, and personal responsibility. The asylum to which their paths have led them seems much saner than the mad world they've left behind. "Brooding over all is the head of the sanatorium, a psychiatrist, who has to enact the most frightening scene at the close of the play.... Mixes bizarre comedy and satire, sometimes extremely amusing, with a science fiction approach." Stage, London.The Physicists is a provocative and darkly comic satire about life in modern times, by one of Europe's foremost dramatists and author of the internationally celebrated The Visit.
language: English
title: The Physicists
titlecomplete: The Physicists
characters: Isaac Newton, Monika Stettler, Ernst Heinrich Ernesti, Johann Wilhelm Möbius, Herbert Georg Beutler, Richard Voß, Mathilde von Zahnd, Albert Einstein
genres: Fiction, Plays, Theatre, Drama, German Literature, School, Literature, Read For School, Classics, 20th Century
ratings_count: 31965
publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd