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AT FIRST glance, science and theatre make unlikely bedfellows, but you don鈥檛 need to look far to see that they鈥檝e been making a good go of it recently. Consider the international popularity of plays such as Michael Frayn鈥檚 Copenhagen, Tom Stoppard鈥檚 Arcadia and Terry Johnson鈥檚 Insignificance, all of which explore science themes in their plot lines.

Is there a dichotomy between scientific investigation and staged drama? Not at all, according to Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, senior lecturer in drama and theatre arts at the University of Birmingham in the UK, whose fascinating new book Science on Stage puts the relationship under the spotlight.

Science and performance, as Shepherd-Barr explains, have always fed off each other. In Renaissance Europe, professors staged public 鈥渆xperiments鈥� in anatomy theatres. Christopher Marlowe鈥檚 Doctor Faustus, written in the late 16th century, was the first of a long line of plays exploring the ethics of science.

The 20th century saw the birth of a whole school of instructional scientific drama. Hallie Flanagan鈥檚 E=mc², produced by the Federal Theater Project in the US in the 1930s, examined the potential dangers and benefits of nuclear energy. Its British equivalent, Ewan MacColl鈥檚 Uranium 235, personified mass and energy, used ballet to explain quantum theory and toured the UK.

What no one could have foreseen was a time in which scientific drama was as commercially popular as it is today. I suspect there are several reasons for this advance. The most obvious is the multiplicity of moral issues created by modern science 鈥� the mapping of the human genome, for example, and the possibilities offered by cloning. TV documentaries and science pages in newspapers have ensured that audiences now have a nodding acquaintance with chaos theory or Fermat鈥檚 Last Theorem, previously off-limits to all but specialists. The most significant reason, however, is that we are blessed with a generation of theatre-makers of exceptional intelligence who are also avidly curious about scientific processes: dramatists such as Frayn and Stoppard, directors like Peter Brook and Simon McBurney, co-founder of the UK-based experimental theatre company Complicite.

Shepherd-Barr goes even further. Whereas dramatists of previous generations such as Bertolt Brecht and George Bernard Shaw debated scientific issues, she says, modern writers like Frayn and Stoppard do much more: they enact the ideas they engage. Thus Copenhagen is not just about what may or may not have happened at the famous meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941: it actually applies the uncertainty principle to memory and shows the actors orbiting the stage like electrons, neutrons and protons. Likewise Arcadia does not simply explore the second law of thermodynamics and chaos theory: through its fragmented structure and rearrangement of causality, it embodies them.

鈥淭heatre needs science in order to engage with ethical issues鈥�

Are there any downsides to the proliferation of science on stage? There is always the possibility that theatre gives the illusion of understanding. There is also the risk of the pseudo-intellectual play using science as a decorative add-on. I part company with Shepherd-Barr, for instance, in her praise for David Auburn鈥檚 Proof, which deals with the link between genius and insanity. Its exploration of science is limited: there鈥檚 a giveaway moment when a doctoral student starts to explain a dead mathematician鈥檚 revolutionary theory and then proceeds to walk off stage, a classic Broadway con-trick that teases the audience鈥檚 curiosity without satisfying it.

This aside, the interaction of science and theatre strikes me as mutually beneficial. Science has always used theatrical forms of presentation, and presumably always will. Theatre in turn needs science in order to engage with ethical issues and give complex ideas intellectual currency. C. P. Snow famously foresaw a widening gulf between science and the humanities, but where are the modern-day Snows? Melted into oblivion, I鈥檇 suggest, in the age of Copenhagen, Arcadia and Complicite鈥檚 Mnemonic.