Theatre: Hypatia (★★★)

Devised and performed by The Open Lid Ensemble
The Blue Room Theatre until August 26

What an interesting pair of plays are now on at the Blue Room Theatre.
Scott McArdle’s Laika (reviewed in last weekend’s West) took us inside the Soviet space programme of the 1960’s, and now The Open Lid Ensemble’s Hypatia takes us back to Egypt in the 5th Century CE.
Both plays grow from historical fact and the actual people who made it; both employ imaginative theatrical processes to deliver narrative drive and draw insight from their subjects.
Hypatia (Kat Shaw), the Neoplatonic philosopher, mathematician and astronomer was a leading figure in the intellectual life and political disputes of Alexandria, the ancient melting-pot of ideas, ethnicities and religions, famous for its great library and schools.
And Hypatia was a woman.