Incognito, Bush Theatre, by Nick Payne

Nick Payne has cemented his reputation as one of the country’s most exciting playwrights over the last few years with a string of thought-provoking and engaging plays. From the quantum mechanics filtered love of Constellations, to his recent exploration of personal injury claims in The Same Deep Water as Me, Payne has created rousing and concise dramas that explore unusual themes.

His latest play at the Bush Theatre, Incognito, falls into the same pattern. Tracing three interwoven stories across fifty years, the play examines the nature of genius, our neurological makeup, and the cutting edge of recent research in neuroscience. It’s an exhilarating ride through amusing, poignant, and terrifying stories that repeatedly probe our understanding of our cognitive and mnemonic functions.

The main thrust of the action concerns three interlinked stories. In the 1950s, Thomas Harvey performs Einstein’s autopsy, but then ‘steals’ his brain in order to undertake further tests on it. In the present, a journalist tracks down Einstein’s granddaughter and Harvey so that he can write an article on the brain’s story and perform DNA tests. Meanwhile, a previously married and aging female semi-alcoholic neuroscientist goes on a date and falls for a recently out-of-work younger female solicitor. Their lives are interwoven with the fate of Henry Maison back in the nineteen fifties, who is undergoing a psychological trauma. Still following? Good.

 

The piece plays at breakneck speed, with scene and temporal shifts happening almost instantaneously. Some characters are barely introduced before they disappear, only to reappear later. It’s an exhausting opening twenty-minutes, but once the action settles down it is easy to follow the flow from one narrative to the next. The uniformly strong performances from the acting quartet also help to route the action in our minds. They all move effortlessly between a multitude of major and minor characters, switching from austere nineteen-fifties British accents, to Sydney Australia drawls, to Ivy-League cool.

 

I left the Bush Theatre breathless from the plays pace and ingenuity. It is far from perfect, but it is another example of the great work currently coming from Nick Payne’s pen. I can’t wait to see what he does next.