And she starts off chatting to us, seemingly in mid-conversation, like a neighbour talking over the fence. And she follows her own line of thought, this woman, played by Emily Woof, bright and charming with a funny turn of phrase.
And she tells us about her husband whom she calls Dotty – and he calls her Dotty too, just like Giles and Mary call each other Nutty in Gogglebox – although his real name is David Chiltern and he is actually a super intelligent neuroscientist.
And where her conversation darts all around the houses, with its digressions and lateral leaps, his is logical and exact. And although he can be painfully literal, she loves him all the same, even when they look at a tree together and she sees something joyful and poetic and he sees a complex network of atoms.
And so when physical incapacity prevents him from travelling to Pontresina, Switzerland, to deliver a talk – Criticality, Connectivity and the Neuronal Avalanche – it does not take too much to persuade her to read it on his behalf, even though she doesn’t understand a word.
And yet she feels instinctively she does understand it, not least because it was her brain he once photographed during a neuronal avalanche, a burst of activity whose purpose is not fully understood, but is a natural wonder.
And here, down the road from the building known as Nietzsche House, where the philosopher spent several summers doing some of his best thinking, not to mention dancing – dancing! – before ending his years in an asylum, she finds herself making her own connections and celebrating abstract thinking that is every bit as rich as her husband’s rational analysis. And like the wool she spools across the stage, which turns into an Alpine slope, she finds a way to connect, to join the dots of a blizzard of experience, in a show that is brainy in every way.
