There is a thread running through Siobhán Nicholas’ play, Stella, that awkwardly stitches together a historical montage of events to reveal society’s changing attitude towards women in science. It also edges warily around the thorny and unresolved issue of whether it is possible for a woman to have a career without feeling as though she is neglecting her family.
The main focus of the story is Caroline Herschel, whose brother William discovered Uranus. Despite her clearly superior skills at mathematically indexing every star they observed, allowing these to be cross-referenced later by other astronomers, she was seen only as William’s assistant.
The unfolding of her unfulfilled life was painful to witness. From a late-18th Century standpoint, William was seen as showing great benevolence in caring for his spinster sister. 21st Century eyes see the unintentional selfishness, born out of the attitudes of the day, that forced her to support her brother and his career, preventing her from independently pursuing her own. It is some consolation that we know she later went on to discover 8 comets and 11 nebulae in her own right and eventually, at the age of 78, was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal.
The story of Caroline’s life is pieced together throughout the play by 21st Century radio astronomer, Jessica Bell James. (And although this character is a fictional creation of Nicholas’, given the themes of the play, there is surely a nod here to one Jocelyn Bell Burnell who discovered the Pulsar Star - for which her two male tutors won the Nobel Prize.) While the fictional Jessica has a successful career, she continues to feel guilty about not giving up her career to follow her travelling-musician husband, despite the fact their daughter is now all grown up and taking a gap-year in Alexandria.
And this is the link that plunges us back further still, to the days of antiquity and to Hypatia: lecturer in mathematics, philosophy and astronomy, and Head of the Platonist school in Alexandria in around 400 CE; murdered by Christians who disapproved of science, and even more so of women who didn’t know their place.
Jessica’s daughter sends a video to her mum’s phone of her and her friends, in Alexandria, reciting Hypatia’s Chorus. Jessica’s daughter also reports taking part in protests – presumably, then, this is November 2011, when the protests in Egypt reached their height. The tension mounts towards the end of the play as we wait to see whether, nearly two thousand years later, attitudes have really changed – or will history repeat itself.
A lot of information was given throughout the play: all of it was interesting, but not all at once. The stories of Caroline and Hypatia are fascinating, but connecting them is tricky. Attitudes towards women, their position in the work place – as scientists or otherwise – and the work-life balance, is also worthy of discussion. The body of knowledge that constitutes astronomy is a world of wonder, the protests in Egypt and the role of women within that context is entirely another matter. In attempting to weave these complicated strands together, some formed an oddly connected pattern and others were left loosely hanging. This was a strangely disappointing and intriguing work, that yet held promise.
Show ran 19 – 20 November