Shelley and Lovelace Never Met
Created by Becky McKercher and Sarah Thuswaldner
Produced by Dangerous Dames Theatre
60m
Content notes: PG. Masking performance, Described performance, Violence, Sexual content, Mental health
Mary Shelley and Countess Ada Lovelace never met, but this smart 2-hander attempts to answer the question “what if they had?” Afterall, they shared a connection via Lord Byron and both lived in London, UK, around the same time.
Shelley was a friend of Byron’s. In 1816, she was one of the people whiling away a miserable summer near Geneva with Byron and his friend John Polidori during which there was a competition to see who could write the best ghost story. And Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
Lovelace was Byron’s only legitimate child. Ada never met her father, as her parents separated when she was 5 weeks old. Her mother demonized Byron and, by extension, all poets. This may have been a factor in Ada’s dislike of Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Becky McKercher and Sarah Thuswaldner, the creators of Shelley and Lovelace Never Met, have obviously done their homework in researching the complicated turbulent lives of these two brilliant women. They’ve distilled a huge amount of biographical material into a compelling 1-hour play.
Mary and Ada meet as ghosts visiting Byron’s grave. They have a lively wide-ranging discussion about their relationships with their parents, their spouses, Byron (of course), and their delight in knowledge. They were both voracious learners of a wide range of topics, with Mary skewing towards political philosophy and Ada’s primary passion being mathematics. They both want to know if they’ll be remembered in the future. Neither can imagine that they’ll eclipse the famous men in their lives and, in Mary’s case, her famous mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
But we know better. Millions have read Frankenstein or seen a play or film based on it. Lots of mathematicians and computer geeks know Ada Lovelace as the first computer programmer, because she wrote an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. She also predicted that such devices would evolve to do much more than compute. There’s even a sophisticated programming language named after her.
If you are a history buff, a feminist, a fan of science fiction, a mathematician or computer programmer, or just someone who would like to meet two fascinating geniuses of the nineteenth century, then be sure to see Shelley and Lovelace Never Met.
Shelley and Lovelace Never Met is playing at LabO until June 25, 2023. Visit ottawafringe.com/fringe/ for the schedule and box office info. Read more reviews at https://apt613.ca/category/festival/fringe/.
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