Enter Feynman, as clown

QED, a play by Peter Parnell, directed by Gordon Davidson.

The public Richard Feynman: O-rings, safe-cracking, bongo drums, naked women, atheism, the joyful questioning of authority, whether in physics or bureaucracies. The one thing everybody knows about him is that, when testifying before a panel of the US Senate investigating the Challenger disaster, he dropped a piece of O-ring, a rubberoid gasket, into a glass of ice water and demonstrated that such rings get brittle when cold — thus illustrating the cause of the fuel leak and explosion. Many have also read that, arriving at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1943, a brilliant kid, PhD at 24, he could crack any of the offices' safes containing the secrets of the bomb research, thereby demonstrating that security was lax. And he played bongo drums, and was an obdurate, thoughtful atheist, and frequented topless bars in Los Angeles, and took art lessons so that he could draw nude models. Some also know that he was an inspired teacher at Caltech. The persona grew from interviews, public appearances and several books about him in which he connived. He played himself as trickster, an eccentric genius.

Enter Alan Alda as Feynman, rushing in to the bongo beat. Except for some voices on his answering-machine, and a brief appearance of a young woman student in Act II, this is a one-man show, and Alda plays Feynman broadly, as clown. The play is set in Feynman's office during an afternoon and evening in 1988, while he was dying, as we learn, of a crushing abdominal carcinoma. The office is cluttered, bongo up front, desk piled, behind it a blackboard scrawled with mystifying mathematical jottings. Alda drums, jumps about the stage, drums, talks to the audience, to the telephone — his surgeon, his oncologist, this colleague or that — drums, piles up the Feynman anecdotes.

Alda is an actor celebrated for a variety of theatre and film work, but above all for 11 years in the TV series M*A*S*H. His New York accent is perfect, he even looks acceptably like the man, his comic timing is professional — but there are occasions in theatre when 'professional' is a substitute for depth, a term of reproach. What was behind the persona? Almost any photograph of Feynman shows his alert intelligence, twinkling with speculation, waiting to pounce. In the bruising intellectual world of high-energy physics, where everyone who makes it is an alpha male, Feynman's wit and assertiveness sprang from the originality and speed of his understanding. He applied this to the public world as well. Scientists know that he invented a graphic method, astonishingly original — Feynman diagrams — for anatomizing interactions of subatomic particles so that their behaviour could be calculated. This led to his work developing quantum electrodynamics, QED, the theory of almost everything, which won him a Nobel prize.

Actor, playwright, director — in this piece of theatre they have conspired to keep us from Feynman's intelligence. We get 40 seconds of a Feynman diagram scrawled on that blackboard as a gee-whiz illustration, when these were tools for discovery. Instead of Feynman's speed of comprehension we get frenetic, fussy movement. Elements of potential pathos — in Act I reminiscing about his first wife, dead of tuberculosis in 1945, in Act II facing the imminence of his own death — are drained of emotion by the constant straining for laughs.

What's left? An anthology of anecdotes and aphorisms. “Nature is a woman.” “We must think in probabilities.” “All science is a constant attempt to describe nature” — standing alone, a silly statement. “If you ask Nature the right question, she will give you the right answer.” And at the end an embarrassing brief homily to that young student, to the effect that if she works really, really hard and can find the courage not to know certainty, she too can be a physicist.

QED is playing at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, until 13 May 2001.