It's a great feeling when you go to the theatre and are told a new story you have never heard before.
Hanging Hooke tells the story of Robert Hooke. Before seeing the play I thought I knew that Saint Paul's Cathedral was designed by Christophen Wren. Turns out he designed it with Robert Hooke, a man who until now I'd never heard of.
I'm not alone in this. This relatively new play written by Siobhán Nicholas, tells the story of a man effectively written out of history. And not just any man, Hooke is described as the English Leonardo Da Vinci. He is a gifted architect and engineer, he designed a prototype flying machine, a clock that would work on a ship and some of the most sophisticated microscopes and telescopes of the day. He was also a fine artist, drawing amazing illustrations for the books he published on the natural world. He was a scientific genius, he wrote about natural selection before Darwin, figured out gravity before Isaac Newton and is the person who told us all how springs worked.
In the first part of the play Chris Barnes plays the painter Jack Hoskins, describing his friend Hooke who he brought to London as a child. He is working on a painting of Hooke and turns the easel around for the audience to see. When he does so, we realise that the props on stage feature in the painting and he moves them into place to mirror its composition. Then he takes his place amongst them and removes his coat to reveal the same suit Hooke is wearing. As he steps into the painting he transforms before our eyes into Hooke himself. The physical difference between the two characters is starling. As Jack Hoskins, Barnes moved precisely and sedately and the character had a quiet contemplative tone. As Hooke, he hunches over and walks with a limp, but nevertheless darts around the stage with a feverish energy, particularly when describing his scientific theories. One experiment he decribes features Hooke encased in a sealed tank before an audience, from which the air is gradually pumped. Barnes recreates this painful and disconcerting feeling by standing on his head in the middle of the stage while describing it, an impressive feat. The character's passion and enthusiasm for his subject is infectious and we feel as passionate and fascinated as he is. This really drew the audience in to empathise with Hooke, I felt real affection and love for the character. So when Hooke discovers he has been betrayed, his ideas stolen and his name written out of history we are enraged and heartbroken on his behalf.
For this play is no dry scientific lecture, it has a plot as compelling as Dan Brown's Da Vinci code, (only well written and not based on a load of conspiracy theory guff.) Hooke has a brainwave and comes up with a theory of gravity, how it keeps planets in orbit around the sun and how all things attract each other. He writes to Newton who he feels would be the ideal colleague to aid him in working out the specific mathematical ratios for this but doesn't receive a reply. A number of years later Newton publishes a book with Hooke's idea in it and claims it as his own. He destroys Hooke's portrait hanging in the halls of the Royal Society and works to discredit and remove him from office. Finally he sends a fellow member of the shadowy secret college, bound to him by a secret oath, to steal Hooke's folio of papers, the only records Hooke has of his work and ideas. The man Newton sends is none other than Hooke's oldest friend, the painter Jack Hoskins.
It's all just so interesting. Just the facts of the story are gripping but add in the fascinating 17th Century scientific theories and the lovable tragic character bought to life so skillfully by Chris Barnes and you have a real masterpiece.
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