Science on stage: should playwrights respect history and truth?

Critics of science plays cannot accept that playwrights are free to depict real historical events and people as they like

Theatre and science have had a long history together, but in recent decades there has been a sharp surge of interest in putting scientific ideas on the stage. Just this year two new "science plays" have premiered: Tom Stoppard's The Hard Problem opened at the National Theatre in January, set in the high-pressured world of a cutting-edge brain research institute, and a few months later Tom Morton-Smith's play Oppenheimer opened at the Royal Shakespeare Company and then transferred to the West End. It has been praised for merging "real" science, biography and history while not skimping on, or dumbing down, the scientific ideas it depicts.

In contrast, several films that have had meaty scientific subjects like The Imitation Game, depicting Turing's code-breaking efforts at Bletchley, or the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, have actually contained very little science and focused instead on biography.