"Noether". Mathematical Institute. Review by Victoria Tayler

A play, like its subject, bursting with creative brilliance. Esme Somerside Gregory has written and directed something precious, touching, and truly necessary. I was completely ignorant of Emmy Noether’s life going in, yet a tastefully staged homage to her many, many publications over the years had me streaming tears. Yael Erez is the perfect casting choice: gently letting slip a world of academic wonder that bleeds out over the stage and infects its cast. You want to live in her reality forever.

It’s not a kind reality. Noether’s life is marred by misogynistic academic boards and, of course, the crushing impact of Nazism. But Erez's Noether glides through it all, conjuring up a powerful subjective world of her own characterised by a love of learning and a radical commitment to kindness. She is maternal, in a way that feels genuinely agentic, choice rather than expectation. The careful writing highlights her Mr Keating-style fondness for her students as the anomaly in an ambivalent administration. Other professors (male, and enfranchised with a real professorship, facing none of the struggles of Noether) lament marking. Noether quietly, charmingly, expresses her adoration for it. 

I suppose in less capable hands, even the glorious, admirable character of Emmy Noether could have fallen flat. She’s an exceptional forerunner for feminism, a faraway woman allowed to ascend to quasi-male status through pure genius, who chose to care lovingly for her male students even when they turned towards the exact political force that had disenfranchised her of those things that she loved. This play avoids any ambivalence by creating that story afresh. Far from feeling like an impossible historical example, Emmy Noether is eerily close to your heart. You cannot help but feel personally proud of her as she stands in the middle of the stage, staring lovingly at her maths.

Such careful cultivation makes the arrival of Nazism, in the form of a brownshirted student, so acutely terrible. It hurt me in much the same way as Cabaret. We exist in the glorious inner world of our dreamy and optimistic characters, and the evil comes out of nowhere, blindsliding. The realisation feels new even though a carefully engineered programme, and indeed world history, had warned me it was coming. 

Still, all the time, cruelty and fear is powerfully squared off by girlhood and genuine joy, shining and bright. It helps perhaps that the characters in this cast are rarely played as straightforwardly masculine, even when the role is clearly referencing professors who enjoyed all the privileges of being a man in Noether’s society. By rendering fluid the gendered differences between characters, it is so easy to see how the barriers set up against Noether for her womanhood feel flimsy. When she finally arrives at the all-women’s college of Bryn Mawr after fleeing the Nazi regime, we get the genuine sense that she has somehow been made free, even in the face of the discrimination she openly experiences through being prevented, for example, from teaching at Princeton. She remakes girlhood into something protective, and the play, seemingly reading from actual biography, says that Noether claimed this to be the happiest time of her life.

The direction is impeccable and the writing is original and awe-inspiring. It will make you cry. There is perhaps a sense that the play is a little (tiny bit) underrehearsed on that opening night, in the form of tripped words or slightly hesitant choreography, but in a play thrust forth by such sophisticated devices, this is perfectly fine by me. In fact, it’s a perfectly manufactured excuse to go see this show a second time. Perhaps tonight?