Biographica

This magnificent, moving, almost magical production tells the story of Renaissance polymath Gerolamo Cardano (1501 – 1576) – a nexus of human tragedy, science, religion, medicine, superstition and memory.  Why should we be interested – and indeed touched and gripped by Cardano?  Because this is an intensely human story about the juxtaposition of great achievement against human frailty and loss.

It takes us inside the mind of this troubled genius via a wondrous combination of music, voices, images and poetic rhetoric.

Dion Mills – who has an uncanny resemblance to the original – is Cardano, the narrator of his own story.  He sits at a disordered desk, on which are three lighted candles (note how the candles go out, one by one), or he strides across the stage to harangue us with his thoughts, insights and discoveries, or he is witness to key scenes from his life.  In a series of lyrical, rhetorical monologues – in the first of which he predicts the ‘very day on which [he] shall die’ - he remembers his bloody birth, his most famous and subversive medical triumph, the deaths of his children and their ghosts’ return to haunt him…

Mary Finsterer’s music – a wonderfully original amalgam of musical styles, voices and choice of instruments – evokes both the period and the emotions that are created by tableaux images.  They are at once beautiful and so strikingly clear in telling the story.  The orchestra, conducted by Patrick Burns, renders Finsterer’s score with all its light and shade and narrative drive – contrasting Cardano’s triumphs and discoveries with his bitter disappointments and tragedies. 

It is ironic that one of his achievements was his first study of probability, but also that, as a believer in astrology, it was his caustic, aggressive manner and illegitimate birth, rather than the stars, that hindered his rise to the greater fame he so much desired.  A late scene in which he is yet again rejected by Milan’s College of Physicians is well nigh perfect in its combination of all the elements that make Biographica the superb show that it is. 

Director Heather Fairbairn’s primary influences in the creation of her images are the paintings of Caravaggio and Gentileschi.  Here, these images are achieved by the faultless collaboration of Fairbairn’s mis en scene, Savanna Wegman’s design and particularly Niklas Pajanti’s sculptural lighting.   As the story proceeds, various elements – the red cloth that is the blood of Cardano’s birth, a winding sheet, scattered pages of manuscript – remain on stage, reminding us that the inescapable past weighs always on Cardano’s memory.     

Apart from Mills, who speaks in heightened prose, an ensemble of fine singers – Belinda Dalton – soprano; Juel Riggall – mezzo; Rachel Joyce – soprano; Douglas Kelly – tenor; and, stepping in very late in the piece, but with great presence and voice, Raphael Wong – baritone – all play multiple parts which they distinguish one from another completely clearly.