Insignificance

Insignificance centres on an imagined meeting between Albert Einstein, who is deliberating whether to testify to McCarthy’s House Committee, and Marilyn Monroe, who is being pursued by her jealous husband Joe DiMaggio. Over one night in a hotel room, the characters grapple playfully with the difficulties of knowing the world, each other and themselves.

Director David Mercatali comments, When Insignificance premiered, America had a celebrity president in Ronald Reagan. Now it has a celebrity president once again. It’s a fascinating time to revive this play about four individuals who are also towering icons, at the top of their games. What’s the reality of that for them? And what happens when the fantasies we project on to people become part our reality, part of the world we live in?

Insignificance premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 1982, and was voted one of the top hundred plays in the NT2000 Platform series. It won Terry Johnson the Plays & Players Award for Best Play, and the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright.

What if four icons of Ike's America - Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Senator McCarthy - met in a New York hotel room in 1953?... [Insignificance is] a piece that works on just about every level: the intellectual, the emotional, the playful...one of the landmark plays of the decade (The Guardian).