Calculating Kindness: Play about tragic scientist to be staged yards from where he died

Pioneer: George Price

A new play inspired by the tragic story of a pioneering scientist is being staged only yards from where he took his own life in despair after his groundbreaking discovery.

George Price taught himself evolutionary genetics and dedicated his life to studying altruism. He came to the conclusion that people only did good to others in an attempt to help themselves and their own family.

His theory — the Price Equation — impressed the scientific establishment so much that he was given a position at University College London shortly after he walked in off the street to talk to staff about it. However, its implications haunted him.

He gradually gave away all his possessions and worked with alcoholics and the homeless before killing himself in 1975, aged 52, in a squat in Tolmer’s Square just behind Camden People’s Theatre — where the show, Calculating Kindness, will be performed.

Its director Laura Farnworth said she became “hooked” by his story after reading a review of a biography of Price: “I spent the next few years trying to find out who this guy was who’d made some quite contradictory choices in his life.

“He had gone from being a militant atheist, and looking into questions of how we behave to each other, and ended up as a fundamentalist Christian. For dramatic purposes it felt like a story that wanted to be told.”

Farnworth spoke to Price’s two daughters — who live in the US and are coming to London to see the drama — and teamed up with playwright Lydia Adetunji to tell the story. Adam Burton plays the scientist. The choice of venue was no accident and Laura said Camden People’s Theatre was “a fitting place to tell the story”. She said: “We are close to the Wellcome Trust, which has supported the play, and UCL so it just felt very much of that territory — he really has walked these streets.

“The story itself is sad, on one level it is bleak. He had booked himself in to see a psychiatrist five days after he ended up committing suicide, so there is that tragic timing. Equally, there are really probing questions this man was asking about who we are. He never stopped and he went to such extraordinary lengths to push those questions — so there is some hope I guess.”

Calculating Kindness is at Camden People’s Theatre from March 29 to April 16.

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