Loco Motion: Railway perception, relativity and the stage

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Notes

¹ Robert Wilson's opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) was perhaps the most obvious performance specifically to take on Einstein as both form and content. Richard Foreman and Merce Cunningham, among others, have also credited Einsteinian relativity as an influence on their understandings of theatrical space and time.

² Nicholas Daly discusses several plays on the London stage from the summer of 1868 that all specifically staged modernity's technological fearsomeness and the audience's desire to conquer and exceed it in the form of scenes that depict railway rescues: Watts Phillips's Land Rats and Water Rats, George Spencer's Rail, River, and Road, Alfred Rayner's Danger, Dion Boucicault's After Dark: A Tale of London Life, and even a play that had a railway rescue scene added to it later, T. Montcrieff's The Scamps of London(Daly 2004).