The Chemistry Between Them
- Submitting institution
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Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- 28724791
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- BBC Radio 4
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first performance
- August
- Year of first performance
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Written by Adam Ganz, the radio play The Chemistry Between Them centres on Margaret Thatcher’s relationship to her Oxford University chemistry lecturer, Dorothy Hodgkin, the Nobel Prize winner and first working mother whom Thatcher encountered. The radio play creatively reconstructs this largely unexamined aspect of Thatcher’s life, utilising material discovered during extensive research in the Bodleian and Thatcher Archives, as well as interviews with key figures in Thatcher’s life and Hodgkin’s doctoral students. The play provocatively argues that Hodgkin, as a highly esteemed scientist, a woman and a mother, was a role model for Thatcher, despite their political differences.
Although rooted in archival and historical research, the writing of the play also demanded an approach and methodology that would reveal experiences, connections and tensions that would normally remain hidden or undocumented in a purely ‘fact-based’ work. A key challenge of the research process was therefore to develop a narrative form that would reveal the changing emotional and intellectual dynamics between Thatcher and Hodgkin, as their roles shifted from inspiring teacher and callow pupil to anti-nuclear campaigner and Conservative Prime Minister. Ganz regards Thatcher as a scientist by training and employs metaphors from crystallography as a structuring narrative device. These, in turn, provide a means of understanding the relationship between the two women as well as establishing a range of connections across science, politics and story-telling. In doing so, the play also extends the conventions of biographical narrative by reconfiguring the relationship between fact and fiction as an active interplay between historical actuality and imaginative possibility.
The play was broadcast on the 20th of August 2014 on BBC Radio 4. It received considerable media attention, was part of the International Year of Crystallography and was widely reviewed, including in Nature 514, 304 (2014). See portfolio of contextual information for more details.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
