The Half-Life of Marie Curie
By: Lauren Gunderson / Narrated By: Kate Mulgrew, Francesca Faridany
Length: 1 hr and 19 mins
SAVED! by Kate Mulgrew’s character, Kate Mulgrew’s performance
Seriously!
Cuz if you’re looking for the fascinating Marie Curie, her razor-sharp mind, her brilliance? All you’re gonna get is a VERY French (And wasn’t she Polish/only naturalized French citizen?) weepy woman who flies off the handle and who’s waaaaay too fond of her little bottle o’ Radium, apparently her Security Blanket.
But Kate Mulgrew as Hertha Ayrton is wonderful! Now THERE was the keen mind, what with her biting quips, the hilarious comebacks to all of Curie’s moaning.
We enter the production approx. 6 years post-Pierre Curie (Having died earlier) as Curie is trying to survive the taunts, the accusations, the malicious crowd outside her home: She’s a harlot, a home wrecker, and how dare she have an affair with a married man? For him? He’s been unfaithful, tsk tsk. For her? Stone the whore to death!
THIS is what Curie is having to deal with, the repercussions of an affair found out. She’s no longer welcome in Science, and tho’ she’s just won the Nobel (AGAIN), she’s being asked to kindly not come, as who on earth can be seated next to this wanton pariah? To the rescue comes Hertha, a brilliant scientist in her own right and quite possibly Marie’s only friend. She’s come to take Marie, take the two daughters, back to England, to the seaside where the family can cope, and grieve, and find peace.
But first there’s Marie getting all hysterical with Francesca Faridany’s THICK French accent having her sound all shrill as a fishwife (A weak and wimpy fishwife). And later?
Later, there’s more wonderful back and forth between the two women as they comment on science, and the wonder of the Big Truths to be found, that magical moment when Nature opens up to reveal a Truth to an individual who’s been tirelessly searching, asking the leading, the right questions. And that they happen to be women? They have mighty Huzzahs for that, and it’s a rousing cheer for women, women of science, women of the suffragist movement, women who WILL be seen and who WILL have awesome lives.
But first, there’s Marie getting all hysterical as Hertha discovers she’s brought her li’l ol bottle o’ Radium with her, even when she’d speCIFically asked her to leave it in France. And Faridany has her sounding shrill as a fishwife yet again (And this time a conniving and mean-spirited and mocking fishwife). It all gets very harsh on the ears, I must say, and the writing kinda sorta made me mad. Perhaps Curie DID have a hostile topsy turvy temperament, but this production just had her coming off as an unbalanced shrew. I really wished for more of both women’s achievements, rather than having them brought to light via dialogue AFTER the fact (That Nobel Prize ceremony? Though asked not to come, Curie boldly went anyway). There’s nothing of Curie’s chutzpah, only a gleeful drunken back and forth where Hertha and Marie cheer each other on.
Alas, as a history buff, I was disappointed with most of the content, but the final minutes of the whole production paid off, with each woman saying what the two would come to achieve after all this. I’d learned of Curie’s mobile X-ray efforts on the battlefields of WWI when I’d listened to Emily Mayhew’s Wounded, but I was delighted to learn that Curie’s daughter joined her on her daring jaunts (And by the way? Marie put up with a lot of misogyny on the Front also). And Hertha? Well, I’d never known of Hertha before (Yeh yeh yeh, not particularly proud of myself—My sister looked her up on Wikipedia as we were having our book club…), so I was very very happy to learn about her, sad to hear such a bold woman could be taken down by a spider, but ah well.
Mulgrew was great, had me leaning toward choosing one of her memoirs for bookclub. Faridany was a weeee bit over the top with her performance, had me rather wanting to snatch her bottle of Radium away with a good old Nyah Nyah, and THAT’s never good.
Still, as today, Sunday March 14th, is Pi Day? What better way to celebrate than by listening to a short interaction between two brilliant minds, esPECially when one of them is delivered by the fantastic Ms. Mulgrew!
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