Neandertal

They are scientists who set themselves a challenge: to decipher fragments of ancient DNA. But they are also men and women who, in the course of their investigation, will love and tear each other apart. Based on research into the Neanderthal, the biography of Nobel Prize winner Svante Pääbo, and the lives of Rosalind Franklin, Gregor Mendel, Craig Venter and Maja Paunović, director David Geselson pursues an approach that is dear to him: showing how the intimacy of individuals can be impacted by History and can, sometimes, transform it in return. Following on from Doreen and Silence and Fear, his new drama draws on biographical narratives and invites six performers to slip into the daily lives of researchers working on writing a new narrative. Private life and research mingle, feed off each other, collide as their various discoveries, wrested from the solitude of laboratories, shake up our vision of the history of origins and shatter all forms of ideas of racial or ethnic purity.