Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
HEDY! The Life & Inventions of Hedy Lamar
Written and performed by Heather Massie
Q Theatre
March 13- 16
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
While she never got an Oscar, Hedy Lamarr was considered the most beautiful woman in the world and was one of the great movie stars of the mid twentieth century. She starred in many films including “Samsom and Delilah and the Czech film “Ecstasy” which featured a controversial orgasm scene which was banned in many countries.
She was divorced six times, making her one of the most divorced women of the twentieth century, a distinction beaten only by Elizabeth Taylor with seven.
But, in many ways, her greatest distinction was her invention (along with George Antheil} of a “Secret Communication System,” which was a radio-guided device with anti-jamming frequencies which would have had the capacity to interfere with torpedo guidance systems during WWI. The US Navy declined to make use of it.
This device is a component of present-day satellite technology and cellular phone technology.
Her work as an inventor was eventually recognized in 1997 with the Sixth Annual Pioneer Award bestowed on her by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
These are some of the highlights of her career which were revealed in Heather Massie’s one-woman autobiographical show, “Hedy Lamarr”.
Lamarr reminisces about her life, her father, her time in Vienna and later her career in Hollywood. There are her relationships with the various men in her life – an armaments producer, a count, Louis B Meyer and various director and actors.
Many of them were presented by Heather Massie using a of range voices to create to give depth to her performance, although she gave most of the men pretty much the same clichéd accent. Her account of Jimmy Stewart, however, was a delightfully, breathless portrait of the actor.
The various events and activities referred to showed the range of Lamarr’s interests and encounters with her quotes indicating a shrewd mind and a keen observer of life.
Massie managed to turn Lamarr into a remarkable complicated but simple figure who seems to know a lot about life, men and the workings of the world as well as making shrewd observation about her life and her inventions.
However, Massie galloped through her “tutorial” about her guidance system with not much time to appreciate just how important the invention could have been to the war effort.
Massie’s presentation has Lamarr engage the various people in her life over the phone or in having on stage conversations so effectively that in retrospect it seems they were with there on stage.
She also engaged with the audience as a whole and in many cases with individual audience members, a technique which worked as a means of creating Lamarr as well as providing a classy example of how to create a character.
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