A poet and a scientist meet at a radio telescope in an outback observatory. It’s been a popular tourist spot ever since the movie. But this visit is different: our poet is here to write about the scientist and her work for a poetry anthology. And the scientist is pissed off.
Her name is Martina (Gabrielle Scawthorn), she’s in the business of pulsars, and she doesn’t trust poets or their work. Poetry isn’t accurate. The poet, Daniel (Tim Walter), maintains that poetry can communicate the beauty Martina sees in the numbers that make up the edge of the universe.
Martina makes a discovery – a double pulsar – but another, more senior scientist based at the telescope (Christopher Stollery), runs her numbers first, effectively stealing that discovery from her.
Martina is upset – she says she wanted to crack open the ribcage of the universe and pull out two beating hearts (and she isn’t even the poet here) – but credit isn’t supposed to be important in science. She’s only a PhD candidate, anyway; her supervisor would be lead author on the published paper announcing the find. But Daniel, an artist to whom ideas and discoveries have ultimate currency, can’t let this go. Shouldn’t Martina demand recognition for her work? Isn’t this one of the many ways that the work of women scientists – who, due to systemic, centuries old gender discrimination, aren’t often in the position to be lead authors – is left out of history books?
On a set dominated by roiling images of sky and stars by Shaun Gurton, and inspired by the story of Professor Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, who discovered the first pulsar but whose male supervisor was awarded the Nobel prize for it, Ear to the Edge of Time is a play about art, science, ideas and soft resistance. Written by Alana Valentine, a playwright with one eye firmly fixed on the unfairly balanced scales of justice, it’s a generous and empathetic portrait of women who do great things but are continually relegated to the background.
And the strength of her script, and this production, directed with a light and intelligent touch by Nadia Tass, is in those women. As the brilliant, witty Martina, Scawthorn is a powerhouse, whirlwinding from cantankerous to charming to heartfelt and back again – a pragmatist with the heart of an idealist. Her mentor, and Bell-Burnell figure, Professor Geraldine Kell-Cantrell (Belinda Giblin) is the play’s anchor: Giblin delivers a wry, lived-in performance that affords the play some much needed gravity.
Walter’s poet is a sketch we need for the play to work; he is the entry point for the audience into the world of astrophysics. He asks the questions we want to ask about stars and time and the universe, and he argues as we might for Martina’s right to recognition with outrage. But he’s just a sketch, and he felt divorced from his own poetry in his tentative opening night performance.
It’s strange to watch a man explain to a woman that she should fight the gender discrimination at play in her field. The script is making a bigger argument, that Martina is making her own decisions and has her own clear and valid reasons for doing so within an unfair system, but that grey area feels less rich when a man seems to hold all the answers about systemic misogyny. Daniel is out of his depth here, a poet in a world he doesn’t know, and it’s his actions and behaviours that place Martina and her reputation at risk; it’s not until Kell-Cantrell provides further context for Martina’s struggle that it starts to feel like a rich argument. It’s a compelling tension, but it doesn’t quite erase the ‘mansplaining’ optics at play.
Still, Valentine is an excavator playwright, mining ideas for their rich and knotty realities, and here she tackles the intersection of ego, credit, and what worth these ideas have when the playing field was never fair to begin with. It’s an interesting proposition that springs to strongest life when Scawthorn is onstage, somewhere between Earth and the stars, showing us secrets of the universe.