THE WALK IN THE SNOW: The True Story of Lise Meitner
Carousel Theatre: September 9-14, 2019
Tickets at vancouverfringe.com or at the door
Posted September 8, 2019
Jem Rolls, most notable for his fast-paced performance poetry but now seriously into dense, detail-driven, mesmerizing storytelling, tells us he recently placed flowers on the grave of Lise Meitner in Bramley, Hampshire, UK, fifteen miles from where he grew up. It’s a touching admission to what seems to be his most recent obsession: the physicist whose gravestone reads, “A physicist who never lost her humanity.”
So who was she? Born in 1878 in Vienna, Meitner was proclaimed by the Americans as “Mother of the atomic bomb”, an accolade she hated because she had never been interested in creating a bomb. She was a theoretical physicist who, because she was “the wrong sex, the wrong race [Jewish] in the wrong place at the wrong time”, was denied the Nobel Prize. With the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, Meitner’s brilliant career went more or less undercover while her colleagues collected prizes.
Rolls’ delivery is intense, riveting and the name-dropping is relentless: Frisch, Bohr, Strassmann, Coster, Siegbahn, Rosbaud, Hess, Planck and Fermi. Dates march on beginning with Meitner’s birth, to her now-famous walk in the snow with nephew Otto-Robert Frisch and ending with the naming of the 109th element on the Periodic Table of Elements in 1982: Meitnerium, in her honour. That’s like an astronomer having a star named after her/him.
While Lise Meitner is interesting – especially to those who understand what went into the discovery of nuclear fission – Jem Rolls is also interesting: driven, passionate, highly energetic, a first-class wordsmith and a dynamic storyteller whose forceful delivery makes unique demands on his audience. Stay focussed!