Past Events
- The IoI and New End Theatre present
- Taboos Debate
- Venue: New End Theatre, 27 New End, Hampstead, London, NW3 1JD
- Date: March 18, 2006
- Time: Early matinee 2.30-4.30 Debate 5.00-6.30
- Booking: Box Office 0870 033 2733
Taboos is a new comedy about the science and politics of reproduction. Between matinee and evening performances, the play's author, renowned scientist and inventor of the contraceptive pill, Carl Djerassi, will be joined by Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas, theatre critic Patrick Marmion, theatre director Helen Eastman, journalist Dea Birkett, social policy lecturer Ellie Lee, and Nancy Mendoza of the Science Media Centre. They will consider the far-reaching implications of scientific innovation, specifically reproductive technologies, as well as the role of the theatre in exploring these themes.
TABOOS may be seen as a classic tale of scientific progress. A scientific innovation is greeted with outrage from traditional moralists, who predict the collapse of society if the innovation is allowed. But the secular law permits the innovation (because there are deserving cases) and society learns to cope, until the next challenge when the whole process is repeated. TABOOS cleverly raises as many questions as it answers. Are the fundamentalist Christians on uncertain ground basing themselves on a holy book full of unusual family set-ups and a messiah who is the product of a surrogate birth? Will the lawyers be the main beneficiaries of the legal complications of alternative families? What does a child in a lesbian family call its two ‘mothers’? Above all, is it science that is pushing these issues forward, or is it society insisting scientists come up with solutions to questions that traditional social institutions can no longer answer?