"Noether". Mathematical Institute

The term has barely begun, and already Oxford has seen two plays about wrongly overlooked women from history. Last week, at the Schwarzman Centre, Burning Down the House made the case for Laura Kieler, a wannabe playwright whose life story was appropriated by Henrik Ibsen for A Doll’s House. Now, at the Mathematical Institute, we welcome back Esme Somerside-Gregory’s play Noether, about the great, and underappreciated, German mathematician, Emmy Noether, who battled sexism, Nazis and cancer in that order.

There’s a pleasing, geometrical symmetry about Noether playing at the Maths Institute. It was here that it was first performed back in February. Since then it’s been to Edinburgh, and visited other universities as part of the OUDS National Tour, before finding its way back to Lecture Theatre 2 for one final show, still with the same dedicated cast of mostly first-time actors.

Like Burning Down the House, Noether is the result of much research by its author. But Somerside-Gregory is not a professional academic. She’s a physics undergraduate at Wadham, and her college gave her a grant to go to Germany and find the primary sources that ultimately became this play. It was money well spent. Noether is a documentary-style dramatisation of a life blighted by prejudice but never conquered by it. It’s unpretentious, sincere, and twinkles with artistic flourishes.

The cast tells the story of Emmy’s life in an urgent, factual manner, reading from letters, announcing dates and names with testimonial accuracy. The careful grounding of the play in documented facts makes it feel like the actors are bearing witness to a real life and a real person, who is given the dignity of speaking - through photos and documents - with her own words. At the same time, the story is illustrated with movement, patterns and projected documents. It feels not unlike a live version of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: a sober account lifted by a visual style perfectly in tune with its subject matter.

Emmy herself is played by Yael Erez, a constant source of energy, patience and unfailing humanity. The remaining six members of the cast play all the other characters in Emmy’s life, as well as abstract representations of the ideas in her head. In the early stages, their dance-like movements act as blockages to Emmy’s progress, getting in her way, their backs to the audience. But after she is finally accepted as an academic at Göttingen University, the beauty and mystery of maths finds expression through their staccato movements, suggestive of digits shifting, results sliding neatly into place. At the same time, the screens above the stage frequently display mesmerising, geometric permutations and transformations (designed and programmed by Somerside-Gregory herself – which is just one advantage of having a proper scientist involved with theatre). These aren’t just decoration. They are expressive of a mind that sees patterns, questions and solutions that most people wouldn’t even know how to describe, never mind understand.

Noether’s life itself comes, sadly, as no surprise to anyone familiar with the way women and Jews were treated in Europe (and beyond) in the first half of the 20^th Century. What gives this story an inspiring and special perspective is how she herself dealt with the rejection and discrimination she suffered. The production emphasises her indefatigable attitude, as Erez literally skips around the stage, a smile never far from her face. To Noether, what was important was the maths, and so, despite not being given teaching posts when far more highly qualified than her male counterparts, she just kept churning out proofs and theories. And the rest of the mathematical world needed to hear what she was saying. At one extraordinary point in the play, we see a letter she wrote to Einstein – Einstein! – pointing out a couple of errors in his Theory of Relativity (which he quickly rectified).

Undeniably, the documentary format does prevent Noether from developing into a play with complex relationships, developing characters and a narrative arc. For all its affecting subject matter, it maintains a respectful sense of detachment. But this play is not here to adapt a life into fiction; it’s here to right a wrong. At the same time, the presence of contemporary parallels makes this not just a picture of, but a warning from, history. The rise of the far right; the State attacks on higher education; and at campus level, protesting students stopping lecturers from delivering their lessons. All of this happened in Emmy Noether’s world (including being turned down by Oxford for its own petty prejudicial reasons). And some of it is already happening again, a fact not lost on Somerside-Gregory and her team.

This is a humble but passionately-told story of a humble but passionately-dedicated individual. At the end of the play, the on-stage screens display a vast family tree of mathematicians who owe their inspiration to Emmy Noether. It's a statement of solidarity. The authorities tried to keep her out of mathematics. Instead, she became part of its foundations.