Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Macavity’s Not There

In T.S. Eliot’s poem, Macavity: The Mystery Cat, the protagonist is an accomplished feline criminal who causes havoc and confusion but is always is out of sight when the sheriff arrives: “... when a crime’s discovered, Macavity’s not there.” In Durrenmatt’s play, Macavity is there, in a Swiss asylum, but he disappears into a psychotic mind, or rather three such minds, of the men identified as Newton, Einstein, and Möbius. Three nurses have been strangled - by those who apparently love them - with only the delusional husks of the perpetrators left behind. Like Macavity, these are “outwardly respectable” but really quite dangerous.

While all are mad, each is mad in a different way. Newton only pretends to be Newton; he is really, he believes, Einstein. The pretence is a courtesy to the one who believes he’s Einstein. Or perhaps the pretence is a pretence and he really believes he is Newton, or someone else. Möbius has visions and conversations with King Solomon. Einstein is a homicidal maniac. But Fraulein Doktor is in charge of everything, including identity: “It is I who decide who my patients think they are.”

A bit like Chesterton’s A Man Called Thursday, things are not what they seem. As an intimate and devotee of Carl Jung, Fraulein Doktor, is part of a symbolic subterfuge. The name of the place, Les Cerisiers, points to Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard as an inspiration. High intrigue, depth psychology, and murder mystery, all in the space of a theatrical hour. A piece hard to better for complex simplicity. To echo Eliot, “There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.”

Postscript: The Physicists addresses a similar ethical theme to Julien Benda’s classic, The Treason of the Intellectuals but with a rather different twist. It also might be considered a sort of riposte to Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game regarding the desirability of a ‘disengaged’ intelligentsia.

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