Eureka Day is prescient about vaccines debate

IT HAS been about two and a half years since the UK first went into lockdown, but Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day takes Old Vic audiences right back to isolation and school closures – not due to coronavirus, but owing to a mumps outbreak, writes Rithika Siddhartha.

Set in a private day school in California with most West Coast cliches intact – a drop down menu of inclusion categories, organic cookies in sustainable packaging, a stay-at-home dad (who has cashed in on his tech fortune) and mums doing knitting – the play was written and performed before the Covid pandemic.

Eureka Day opens with a committee meeting of five parents who comprise the school’s executive council – three women and two men – portraying seemingly educated, liberal, non judgemental (as if) parents who believe they know what’s best for their own off-spring and that of the wider school.

Friendly (but barbed) discussions about inclusion dominate the first half which ends with a hilarious depiction of a virtual meeting of parents going haywire when news emerges of a child contracting mumps.

Events take a darker turn after the interval, when Spector pokes holes in the tightly held convictions and presumptions of characters who unravel as they are being manipulated.

Does scientific evidence stand up against personal experience and individual perception? Can parents put the greater good of all above their beliefs? How much knowledge is too much, and how dangerous is too little of it?

While the cast are all good, the characters played by Oscar winner Helen Hunt and This is Us actress Susan Kelechi Watson dominate. Watson, as new parent Carina, holds her own as a parent eager to fit in while later finding the courage to stand up to Hunt’s Suzanne, who hides a steely resolve under a pretentious, warm exterior.

Ben Schnetzer’s Eli is versatile as the charming stay-at-home dad obsessed with stretching the limits of diversity and who later becomes a vulnerable parent. Kirsten Foster’s flirty May and Mark McKinney’s mediator Don complete the ensemble cast.

Where once education was seen as the antidote to ignorance and lack of progress in society, the Covid pandemic showed that attending school and university was one thing and having access to the internet was another. Both developed and developing economies had to deal with the fallout of fake news which spread faster than verified news or scientific theory supported by qualified professionals and advocated by political leaders. Have we learned the lessons two years on? Or will a fresh pandemic bring out the old prejudices among us? Eureka Day compels audiences to confront some unsettling answers.

■ Eureka Day is on at the Old Vic until October 31