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Writing fictionally about real people is always a challenging project. How much should fiction draw on knowledge, and how much on imagination? How far is it acceptable to tweak the historical record in order to produce a more aesthetically effective work? And, in the case of the still alive or the relatively recently dead, there are ethical issues about responsibility and reputation. Families have their own perspectives, and in borrowing a person for fictional purposes it is not easy to please everyone.
So when I listened to Adam Ganz’s play about my grandmother Dorothy Hodgkin and her relationship with Margaret Thatcher, obviously I was aware that as a fiction it was adhering to different expectations and standards than a biography, and that the family of a public figure (even in a small way) can’t claim exclusive rights over her memory. Nonetheless I have to say that I was dismayed by this play not only for personal reasons, but also because it seemed to me that its representation of Dorothy was politically as well as humanly misguided, and that this has implications for how one understands the broader relation between politics and science in her life.
On a personal level, certainly, it had plenty of toe-curling moments. Ganz’s representation of Dorothy’s domestic life and her personality constantly rings false: the brisk and patronising character in the play, advising the young Thatcher on contraception and brushing off Thatcher’s visiting father with a reference to her very important guest, is unrecognisable to anyone who knew her. Ganz portrays a lunch party at the Hodgkin house in the mid-1940s to which Dorothy invited the young Margaret Thatcher, telling her that her husband had invited ‘a couple of African revolutionaries’ whom she ought to meet; this embarrassingly condescending way of describing guests would be completely alien to Dorothy. The fact that nobody outside this play ever called my grandfather Tom (he was always Thomas) is irritating only to those who knew him – but there are many people who remember him to be irritated by the patronising effect of the diminutive, and it is the kind of detail that could so easily be got right.
Politically, too, in the portrayal of the meeting between Dorothy and Thatcher at the time of the Cruise missile campaigns in 1983, the dialogue was just impossibly crass. Dorothy was indeed in some ways a political idealist, but she was also pragmatic, and (I need hardly say) she wasn’t stupid. You don’t get to be president of major international organisations (the International Union of Crystallographers, Pugwash) without some degree of diplomatic and negotiating skill. Dorothy undoubtedly made use of her status as Thatcher’s old tutor to gain access to her and to raise issues of importance – university funding, Cruise missiles – but she visited Chequers with political goals in mind rather than as a friend dropping by for lunch. In depicting Dorothy as the kind of person who goes and makes speeches to the Prime Minister about how terrible bombs are, rather than discussing what could be achieved in policy terms at a given political conjuncture, Ganz implies that she could be intelligent only in one domain, that of science, and that her political positions relied purely on naive idealism, in contrast to the deadly realism of Thatcher. Similarly, the clunky and pontificating speeches given to JD Bernal as well as to Thomas make it entirely mysterious that anybody could ever have found these people or these ideas convincing.
Dorothy did not have a very high opinion of Thatcher; as a chemist she thought her average; as a politician she deeply disapproved of her. In 1985, when Oxford University debated the award of an honorary doctorate to Thatcher, Dorothy was opposed to the award because of the harm her government had done to university education. There was no real contact between them over the years, much less any sign of warmth or intimacy. Ganz’s assumptions about their relationship – laid out at greater length and treated as fact in his piece for the BBC website – are spurious and sentimental, and his depiction of the relation between politics and science is simplistic. He mentions in the play her three children, two of them by name. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that these children might well be alive, along with grandchildren, nephews and nieces, and even a sister, who could have helped him with this kind of thing – not to mention her biographer Georgina Ferry, who has herself written a far better play about Dorothy.
It’s disappointing that the BBC has backed such an inaccurate portrayal of one of Britain’s leading women scientists. There are many interesting questions to be raised about how the twentieth century saw women from diverse backgrounds rising to unprecedented heights in their careers, and both Dorothy and Thatcher are examples of this; but this play shows no real grasp of how this might have happened or what it might have meant in historical or personal terms. Dorothy’s real character is part of that story.
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