Mary Anning: A Curious Woman. Written and directed by Suzanne Roux. ?Cogito at the Australian Science Festival, May 2 - 6, 1998.
Top science theatre-in-education, Mary Anning is true to both science and theatre. Donna Cohen is a disciplined professional actor and a highly experienced scientific researcher. She represents what Mary Anning (1799 - 1847) might have become if her social class and the male-controlled scientific establishment of her day had been different.
Mary Anning is a forgotten figure in science - her discoveries of the ichthyosaurus and the pterodactyl fossils were fundamental to our interest in dinosaurs. Yet I had never heard of her till now. The fossils, on display in places like the Natural History Museum in London, are labelled with the names of the collectors who bought them from Mary Anning - but not with her name. She did the work, became the expert, was a public figure visited by the rich and famous in her curiosity shop, but has disappeared from history.
Suzanne Roux - actor, writer and student of philosophy - introduces Mary Anning through a short lecture on the history of the earth, always a fascination to Year 5 - 8 students. Cohen, in a sense, plays herself as lecturer: a very good one at that. After the show, How do we date fossils? becomes an important question. The real scientist provides the answers and discusses the problems.
When Mary Anning appears, the emotional stuff of science draws the audience in to the story of a girl, her carpenter father (whose hammer she used to chip out fossils after his death in a cliff collapse), her dog (killed the same way as her father), her discovery of wonderful new "curiosities", her fame and the way she was viewed by famous scientists, her death from breast cancer. Cohen expertly creates in us the feelings of each episode, and without dwelling on her sad untimely end, smoothly reviews the responses to Mary's death as she seems to look down from on high. I felt as if Mary is still hanging around up there 150 years down the track, watching Roux and Cohen do the right thing by her at last.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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