On my seven-month-old baby’s bookshelf sits a brightly illustrated children’s book about Marie Curie. Its pages celebrate her love of science, her marriage to physicist Pierre Curie, and her status as the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. These are the facts most often recited, but women are rarely one-dimensional. Alongside moments of triumph, often lie moments of despair and self-doubt.
It is one of those lesser-known chapters that Lauren Gunderson explores in The Half-Life of Marie Curie, a play that premiered off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre in 2019, and was later released as an audio drama on the Audible platform. The play now makes its Australian premiere at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre under the direction of Liesel Badorrek (The Glass Menagerie).
Gunderson, frequently referred to as “the most produced living playwright in America”, has a signature formula across her 20-plus plays: identify a compelling duo, hone in on a pivotal historical moment, inject sharp, rhythmic dialogue, and keep it snappy – 90 minutes or less. The result is a biographical vignette interspersed with theatrical poetry. The plays often just recount history – however, at its best, her formula can thrillingly heighten a core emotional conflict. In this case, it’s the friendship between Marie Curie and Hertha Ayrton, and the impact these women had on each other.
Though often relegated to a footnote in Curie’s story, here Ayrton commands center stage...
The narrative begins at Curie’s (Gabrielle Scawthorn) home in Paris, shortly after she wins her second Nobel Prize, amid personal scandal. Her affair with fellow scientist Paul Langevin has ignited a media frenzy, threatening to overshadow her legacy and forcing her into self-imposed house arrest. Enter Hertha Ayrton (Rebecca Massey), a mathematician and engineer, who quite literally bursts through the door of Curie’s exile and whisks her off to the British seaside. There they frolic, quarrel, and find themselves in each other.
Despite its title, The Half-Life of Marie Curie seems more captivated by the woman history barely remembers – Hertha Ayrton –than the woman it promises to center. Though often relegated to a footnote in Curie’s story, here Ayrton commands center stage: sassy, witty, progressive, a suffragist, and the persistent voice on Curie’s shoulder declaring how extraordinary she is. Massey has all the best lines, crafting a performance that’s physical, sharp, and full of warmth and joy. She’s the best friend everyone wants – the kind who shows up, speaks truth, and doesn’t let you drown.
Through Ayrton, Gunderson poses the play’s most potent questions: What makes someone become themselves? And what makes them worth saving? These are big, existential inquiries – about art, science, nature – that, while thematically rich, don’t always sit comfortably within Curie’s historical context. As a result, Curie is too often sidelined, reduced to a figure of gloom. She is the catalyst for the audience to hear Ayrton’s worldview, rather than the other way around.
Gunderson’s Marie feels like a faint sketch of the scientific titan that I came to revere during my university physics studies. Here, she is made small. On one hand, there’s something refreshing about seeing a woman of such legendary stature portrayed as fallible – torn by heartbreak, plagued by self-doubt, unsure of how to move forward. But this portrayal lingers on it a bit too long. This take on Curie is stuck in a single emotional register: brooding, passive, and more consumed by rejection than inflamed by the institutional sexism that shut her out of her own lab. The result is a character who feels diminished to her worst summer.
To her credit, Scawthorn brings depth where she can. She infuses Curie’s desperation with stakes that feel novel, nuanced and grounded. But she’s let down by this production. The staging relies on ethereal video projections cast onto sheer curtains, encircling a central dais (perhaps a nod to Ayrton’s work on arc lamps). But the effect is more clinical than intimate. The bulky wooden platform limits movement and undercuts the unpolished banter of the relationship at the play’s heart. Aside from a hilarious, engaging drunken reconciliation atop the dais, the physicality seems cumbersome, and there is very little visual variety to enhance the emotional arc.
The lighting by Verity Hampson and video projections by Cameron Smith bring to life the theatrical poetry elements that effectively bridge the show's time jumps, and create visually captivating moments.
Is this the first woman to win a Nobel Prize? Or a damsel in distress? The portrayal leans so hard into her mediocrity, it risks erasing her fire altogether. That said, perhaps Gunderson is intent on proving she was just as ordinary as you or I, so that we may feel that we can also do great things.
Ultimately, it’s Massey’s Ayrton who anchors the play. She is the rambunctious spark – jibing, compassionate, insistent – and she transforms Curie’s despair into something bigger. Even when the text falters or the staging feels distant, she keeps the light on and the laughs rolling.
The Half-Life of Marie Curie is playing at Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli, until July 12. Find tickets & info at ensemble.com.au.
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