Nearer The Gods

Nearer The Gods
By David Williamson. Ensemble Theatre. March 4 – April 23, 2022

In his 54th play, David Williamson here turns away from his usual focus on Australia’s contemporary middle class ways and instead looks skywards at Isaac Newton’s theory of celestial mechanics, circa 1684.

He made a similar leap into more intellectual worlds, with plays like Dead White Males and Heretic, back in the 1990’s.  I admired them, some critics didn’t. 

Nearer the Gods introduces a love-deprived, eccentric Newton, a genius teetering on the far edge of the spectrum, hounded by his young colleague Edmund Halley (he of the Comet) to complete and publish his revolutionary laws of universal gravitation.  Williamson typically delights in the idea, true or otherwise, that what really motivated Newton was to outdo his arch-enemy Robert Hooke at the Royal Society. 

Janine Watson’s production sets all this not in long wigs and frocks but in some modern dress world which conjures little imagination or magic.  On Hugh O’Connor’s mostly naked stage, the cast leap through many short expositional scenes and, without a truth of place or verisimilitude, tend to wander into mugging and pantomime.

It’s often a challenge for directors handling Williamson’s near arch social comedies. Treating it like Chekhov usually works better.   

But for sure, there are some good laughs from Gareth Davies as the asocial genius and Sean O’Shea as the pompous Charles II. Rowan Davie is enthusiastic as the atheist Halley and Violette Ayad appealing as his God-loving wife, but here too their tenderness doesn’t always ring true.  Claudia Ware understudies in the under-realised role of the embittered Robert Hooke (think for better of Salieri and Mozart!). 

Williamson runs an entertaining story of jealousies and bad behaviour which might have deprived posterity of Newton’s crowning advances.  But it’s a thin play, with little exploration of the scientific debate now or then, and how it may be echoed in the lives of these characters, for whom we care little. 

It takes two acts of one hour each but Williamson thinks his audience can only cope with a story this linear and simple.  

Martin Portus

Photographer: Prudence Upton

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