La Entrevista

The interview is a play written by the writer Luisa Etxenike and the physicist and writer Gustavo Ariel Schwartz in a transdisciplinary, novel and innovative collaboration. This joint theatrical work is part of the Donostia International Physics Center Mestizajes Programme.

Staged as an encounter between a prestigious scientist at the peak of his career and an exasperating scientific journalist, the play The interview gradually takes shape as an impassioned debate about such topical subjects as the importance and responsibility of scientific research and its relationship with society and public life. However, as the dramatic intrigue progresses, the two main characters cannot prevent this debate from uncovering a second story in which the characters’ identity will take on new features, and their relationship will acquire an unforeseen complexity. Built on personal and moral ambitions and conflicts, the relationship that The interview will gradually reveal will explicitly reflect the one between two of the most important scientists of the 20th century: the Dane, Niels Bohr, and the German, Werner Heisenberg, which suddenly ended after their famous conversation in Copenhagen in 1941.

The play The interview was written as part of the Mestizajes Programme, an alternative space where artists, writers and scientists can come together, aimed at encouraging new interactions between science and the humanities. Therefore, the play is the result of close collaboration between a writer and a scientist, and of many combinations: of forms and languages, analytical and aesthetic approaches, and genres. It is also the result of a fundamental aim of its authors: to create a text in which the literary elements could appear independently of the scientific aspects and vice-versa, but in which both aspects could also be seen as having blended to form a hybrid at the very heart of the writing. As a result of this, The interview has the features of a dramatic piece of work based on the construction and personal development of its characters, its stylistic options, and how it gradually reveals its themes. It also has the features of a scientific proposition that can be transferred to real debates and research fields. However, in its hybridization of literary and scientific aspects, The interview expresses its meaning most emphatically: formulations that become exercises in style; axioms that embody feelings; atoms of matter turned into metaphors for the infinite nuances of human consciousness and emotions.