Lifeline
However, instead of telling Fleming’s story in chronological order, it travels backwards and forwards in time beginning with Fleming’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm in 1945, then skipping to Athens, Greece, in 1952, then traveling back to New York and London’s St. Mary’s Hospital in 1946, then further back to St. Mary’s lab in 1940, and finally ending Act 1 with Fleming’s discovery of penicillin at St Mary’s in 1928. Not only does all this alternate with the Jess/Aaron story in Edinburgh in the present, it often divides the stage in two and tells both stories simultaneously. There seems to be no gain in telling Fleming’s story out of order, as it makes it confusing and hard to follow, while asking us to keep track of the contemporary story with its permutations and additional characters at the same time. [more]
