Queensland Theatre will host the world premiere season of David Williamson’s Nearer the Gods this weekend, featuring a roll-call of stage and television stars under the directorial hand of Artistic Director Sam Strong, staged as the first production in the newly redesigned Bille Brown Theatre. Running through to November 3, Nearer the Gods is a true story about how the greatest advance in human knowledge almost never happened, opening Saturday 6 October.
Genius, bastardry and heroism are the three words Playwright David Williamson uses to describe Nearer the Gods. David explains the plot of the production. “Edmund Halley of Halley’s Comet fame realised that Isaac Newton was the only man in the world brilliant enough to crack the mystery of gravitation, but there was a problem. Newton was unhinged by delusions of grandeur and an implacable hatred of his nemesis Robert Hooke. Halley and his wife Mary had to find a way to coax him back to the main game,” said David.
Given this powerful summation, it is fortuitous that Sam has cast some of the best and most exciting actors in the country in Matthew Backer (Switzerland) who plays Edmund Halley, the much-loved Queenslander William McInnes (SeaChange, Time of our Lives) who will play King Charles II, and Rhys Muldoon (House Husbands) who plays Isaac Newton.
Daniel Murphy will play Isaac Barrow and Samuel Pepys, with stage powerhouse Hugh Parker (The 39 Steps) playing Sir Christopher Wren. Colin Smith (An Octoroon, Twelfth Night) plays Robert Hooke, Lucas Stibbard (Hoges, Wanted) plays John Wickens and Simon, with fellow Queenslander Hsiao-Ling Tang (Rice) playing Joane and Royal Equerry, and Kimie Tsukakoshi (The Family Law, Secret City) as Mary Halley.
David said the play had been in the back of his mind since his University days. “I was the first mechanical engineering graduate from Monash University and Newton’s laws were the foundation of everything we learned, and I was astounded and awed at how one man took us from total ignorance of the laws of the universe to an almost complete understanding in one giant leap. One of the truly great geniuses of all time. But when I started researching him I found to my amazement that but for Edmund Halley, who drew him back from delusions that God had chosen him to reveal his plan for humankind, to solving the problem that no one else could, mankind’s single most significant leap forward in knowledge may never have happened. My playwright’s instinct was what a great story. Everything in the play, based on a great amount of research, either happened or could have happened. The actual sources are sparse, so some conjecture was necessary. Nothing to my knowledge is not plausible.”
He said it was also a story about the dynamics of human nature. “This is a fascinating and blackly funny study of how the deep and ancient emotional impulses urging us to attain power, and status, and to belittle and vanquish our rivals, can be at odds with our advanced capacity for logical reason. You see the opposing forces at work every day in the jugular political and business worlds,” he said.
Of Nearer the Gods being the debut production for Queensland Theatre’s new Bille Brown Theatre (the former Bille Brown Studio has had a $5.5 million redesign and complete makeover with support from the Queensland Government’s Arts Infrastructure Fund and generous donors), he said it would allow audiences to experience theatre in the most comfortable and engaged way. “The new Bille Brown Theatre is state-of-the-art. Actors will be never more than a very short distance away, giving an intimacy and immediacy to the performance like never before, creating a great communal experience.”
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