Hedy! The Life & Inventions of Hedy Lamarr

Not many plays have been written specifically to urge girls to pursue careers in the sciences.

It’s quite a mission, if you consider it: To succeed as a piece of theatre, the encouragement to aim high must be wrapped in an entertaining story. And to succeed in inspiring the youth, the story must be accessible to the audience it’s trying to reach. That’s what Heather Massie has tried to achieve by writing and starring in Hedy! The Life & Inventions of Hedy Lamarr.

Lamarr was a Hollywood screen siren that even my father would struggle to remember, enjoying her heyday in the 1950s. She was described as the most beautiful woman in the world, but this production is designed to highlight her as a role model for intelligence and ingenuity.

Behind the beauty was a remarkable brain, and even without any formal training she devised the radio frequency hopping technology that still underpins our cellphones, GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth systems. Lamarr devised it during the Second World War and gave the patent to the US military so they could make torpedoes more accurate and prevent the Germans from intercepting their signals. But the military sat on the patent, in a move that the character decries as “Men’s pride standing in the way of progress.” They couldn’t accept that a beautiful actress and her composer friend had devised a solution where their own experts had failed, she laments.

US-born Massie herself studied astrophysics before training as actress, and now combines acting with her passion for science and technology. She’s taken Hedy! around the world to theatres, festivals, science centres, technology conferences, universities, schools and museums, and won 14 awards along the way.

Even so, the script could still benefit from some reworking. There are several ‘wow, Hedy did that?’ moments, but they’re insufficiently amplified and simply pass by on the same emotional level as the general narrative. Those wow moments need a pause and more punch to let us absorb the remarkable story.

Instead it's an imperfect blend with too much history of long-dead names that won’t ignite a modern audience, and too little emphasis on the feats of intelligence that made Lamaar astonishing. When Massie brings other characters into the conversation she recites them rather than acts them, which also dulls the dramatic impact that a more spirited recreation would provide.

Beauty has been a blessing and a curse, she says, making her famous, but forcing her to work twice as hard to prove there’s a brain behind the face. Men just gaze at her mouth, rather than listen to what she’s saying.

“Any girl can look glamorous – just stand still and look stupid,” Lamarr purrs. Women can relate to that, and young girls certainly need more role models to show that women can excel in maths, science and ingenuity. But the script, especially in its earlier part, doesn’t support that aim with its overlong history and emotional uniformity.

Lamarr burnt through six husbands, and the one who influenced her future scientific bent was Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian arms dealer who sold weapons to Hitler. Mandl was far older than his teenage bride and became controlling to the point where Lamarr staged an amazing escape by drugging the maid, dressing as a maid herself, and fleeing their palatial home. Yet that entertaining story barely receives any more emphasis than the rest of the narrative. Her escape from her husband also let her flee Austria as the Nazis were rising, which probably saved her life since she had a Jewish heritage.

Ending up in Hollywood, her claim to fame included starring in the first on-screen orgasm, achieved with the aid of a pin unexpectedly prodded into her bottom to take her acting to new emotional heights. With gems like these, the play has the potential to be riveting, yet it falls short.

Massie wasn’t helped by having to act with a moonboot encasing a broken foot, but that didn’t limit her actions too much. Beside, it’s not the action as much as the balance of content that needs tweaking.

At the end, her exhortation to the audience to strive to make the world a better place feels overwrought, and definitely aimed at students despite being performed to adults during this current run. It’s never too late to be inspired to do better, of course.

Hedy! The Life & Inventions of Hedy Lamarr runs at Sandton’s Auto & General Theatre on the Square until August 24. Tickets from Computicket.  Photos by Al Foote and Inspirefest.