Not for a Cat: rediscovered play by Johnian scientist has premiere at St John’s College
A play written in the 1950s by Johnian scientist Wallace Harper has received its premiere at St John’s after his granddaughter contacted the Lady Margaret Players.
Not for a Cat: A Play for the Nuclear Age by Wallace Harper, who was a student at St John’s and worked at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in the 1920s, was staged as part of this month’s Cambridge Festival.
The work, which has never been performed until now, tells the story of a scientist who follows his cat into a nuclear reactor in a rescue bid. The action happens against a backdrop of anxieties about nuclear disaster and the threat of communism.
Canadian Karen Harper, the granddaughter of Wallace, only learned of the existence of the play three years ago when she was shown the manuscript by her father among some old family papers.
She decided that with the 150th anniversary of the Cavendish Laboratory in 2024, it was the right time to hold its premiere. It was written under the pseudonym Henry Latimer.
Karen said: “I first saw the manuscript for the play when my dad showed me a couple of boxes of family history. It was there typed up along with an unpublished novel.
“My grandfather had written a textbook about nuclear energy and my dad thinks that while he was writing this book he started to think about the risks and decided writing a play would be a good way to portray them. But he said it was never produced and never performed.
“He wrote this before any of the major disasters, such as the one at Chernobyl, but he was clearly aware of the risks.
“I took the play home and read it and thought it was really good. My grandfather died when I was one, and so I never knew him, but just reading the play made me feel like I now know him more. I loved his sense of humour, as there is this really dark comedy in the play. I’ve always been interested in theatre and really wanted to do something with it.”
After approaching an arts festival in Halifax, Canada, with no luck, and trying to organise a reading of the work, she decided to reach out to the Lady Margaret Players at St John’s.
The theatre group assembled a director and cast and performed the play for just one night as part of this year’s Cambridge Festival.
The play begins with a dinner party thrown by David and his wife, Susan, which is interrupted when David, who works at a nearby nuclear power station, is called away on an urgent matter. He is followed to the station by their cat, Cara, and she enters one of the reactors. David follows in an attempt to save his pet and faces a potentially fatal dose of radiation. From there, the tale takes a satirical look at the anxieties of the time, mixed in with a dose of chaos and political intrigue.
Joanna Burgess, President of the Lady Margaret Players and producer of the play, said: “When I first read the play I thought it was great. I’m a classicist, so science is not really my forte, but it had the right amount of humour and intrigue to make it a great play to perform.
“We had some video calls to establish what Karen wanted from the play, because it’s her family’s history. It’s her project. And it was clear to see how much this meant to their family.
“We had to cut the script down a bit as the original play was about five hours long, but we did this with Karen’s permission. The story really demonstrates the concerns around radiation, radiation poisoning, and possibility of nuclear explosions happening, at the time that it was written.
“The show ended up being a huge success. We staged it in the Palmerston Room at St John’s and it was almost full. There were also some great discussions afterwards including the place of female scientists at the time as Karen’s grandmother had also been a physicist working at the Cavendish Laboratory.”
The rest of the production team for the play was: Eliza Ousey (Director), Alice Frechville (Assistant Director and Costume), Scarlett Parker (Assistant Director) and Yasmin Herron-Isa (Publicity).
Not for a Cat: A Play for the Nuclear Age was performed at St John’s College during the Cambridge Festival on 5 April.
