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Revived in London for the first time in almost 30 years, Tony Harrison’s ‘Square Rounds’ charts the knotty relationship between seemingly innocuous scientific development and bloody warfare – the constant shadow that accompanies innovation.
After darting around time a bit, Harrison settles on the historically intertwined lives of German Jewish chemist Fritz Haber – who developed the process for synthesising the ammonia necessary for fertiliser, explosives and chemical warfare – and Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, the creator of the first automatic machine gun. Theirs became an arms race fought in the trenches and across the battlefields of the First World War.
From the flushing away of our shit down the new-fangled invention of the toilet, which precipitated an agricultural crisis, to the invention of artificial fertiliser, which unlocked the devastating chemistry for chlorine gas, it’s a salutary tale of our twinned impulses towards creation and destruction.
With the guiding image of the ‘square round’ (a bullet shaped to cause maximum pain to the enemy), the play touches on the xenophobia and racism that has driven the co-opting of science for centuries. And from the British use of dead bodies as fertiliser during the Battle of Waterloo to the use of gas for mass casualties, Harrison traces the way that no taboo is unbreakable.
The history is the most gripping part of the writing, delivered in a rhyming verse that’s initially entertainingly but which slips into repetition and starts to drag after the interval. Like designer Daisy Blower’s ironically black-and-white set here, it’s a little too on the nose, and ends up labouring the play’s point about moral murkiness.
But the darkly playful tone of Jimmy Walters’s production, aided by movement director Depi Gorgogianni’s creative use of choreography, keeps everything moving along, in spite of the occasional lapse into over-earnestness.
An all-female ensemble cast skilfully bring to life a revolving door of historical figures as a mix of parody and tragedy, highlighting the self-delusion of men of science who failed to foresee the consequences of history or how it would judge them.