A Moral Dialectic: Shelagh Stephenson’s An Experiment with an Air Pump

In An Experiment with an Air Pump (1998), Shelagh Stephenson dramatizes a string of conflicts that at once demand and resist resolution – such as past and present, male and female, art and science – and portrays each concept with multiple characters to provide nuanced permutations. Her drama resides in the oppositional pairs personified by her characters, emerging in the clashes between ideologies, in the space of difference – the space that inspires revolution. “When our theatres perform plays of other periods,” writes Bertolt Brecht, “they like to annihilate distance, fill in the gap, gloss over the differences. But what comes then of our delight in comparisons, in distance, in dissimilarity – which is at the same time a delight in what is close and proper to ourselves?” (276). Stephenson’s play, set half in the present and half in the past, answers Brecht’s call for distance and echoes his delight in dissimilarity while drawing connections between worlds two-hundred years apart. The simultaneous staging of similarity and difference, past and present, results in a drama that grapples with issues of ethics and interpretation and requires its audience to do the same.