I've not written a play on this scale before and I think I may be too ambitious. I'm trying to sketch out a plot but I have three main ideas I want to include but it's still very confusing to me exactly what I'm trying to do - I simply woke up one day with the idea that I wanted to write something. The 3 ideas centre around:-
1) my life long fascination with a single sculpture - I recently found the correct name of the artist and went on to discover more of his work - it took me 5 years and a chance dicovery to suddenly unravel more about the sculptor and I'm still in the process of trying to discover more and ideally to contact him but he is now in his 90's. The sculpure gave me nightmares and scared the life out of me everytime I saw it as a kid (aged 7-8 say). Later on in my life I started to appreciate it as a very under-rated piece - for years each time I visit the city where it is located I go out of my way to make sure I see it. The sculpture is well known locally although no-ne seems to know anything about it or the strange inscription underneath it which no-one sems to have noticed.
2) the role of mathematics in helping to put a man on the moon and in sending voyagers 1 & 2 to the outer reachers of our solar system - another childhood fascination - maths and astronomy. I'm a maths teacher and I originally wanted the play to show how maths has been important - e.g. calculating esacpe velocites and the tortures a mathermatician can go through when trying to devise creative solutions.
3) episodes from the lives of Newton,Galileo, Da Vinci and Darwin - particularly those times when their work brought them into conflict with current thinking, religious, social or cultural issues.
The themes were to be linked by dreaming, imagination and problem solving - that used by the sculptor, NASA engineers/scientits/mathematicians and the 4 famous scientists. I had the idea that characters from the various sculptures would appear to a fictional character (or more accurately a character who might be an aggregate of several real-life relatively unknown engineers who were key in the creative maths behind some of the decisons about exactly how to land a man on the moon) during the restless sleep while grappling with the mathematical problems. I really wanted to help gain some recognition for the sculptor. The role of coins also figures - Newton took control of the Royal Mint, and the Newton quote ("standing on the shoulders of giants" appears on the edge of a coin. I wanted to show that now only was Newton standing on the shoudlers of giants but that the NASA scientists/engineers/mathematicians (in fact all such people) were also doing the same in their work. The sculptor in question was also responsible for a well known design on a coin (and Darwin has also figured on UK bank notes). I thought the sculptures would enter with music and dance as part of the dream sequence where the main character wakes and converses with the sculpture-chacters - they introduce the scenes of the famed scientists in their moments of uncertainty and conflict. I had the idea to set the main character in the australian outback - a place where the skies are clear and make for good astronmonical observations through a telescope. A setting where the role of dreaming is important in aboriginal culture.
How do these ideas sound when put together? I'm going through a patch where I am not sure that I can (or even should) tie these ideas together.
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