Papa’s Clean Suit

Radio 4; May 2000
Producer: Janet Whitaker
1h 15min
 
Love; loss; and the relentless march of time. On the eve of her wedding, Elsa Boltzmann reflects on the life and death of the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. Woven around Elsa’s recollections of her father, the play recaptures the essence of Boltzmann’s famous (unrecorded) lecture ‘On Love and Entropy’ presented to the Viennese Philosophical Society in September 1905. It also recounts the tragic aftermath. Part scientific mystery and part love story, Papa’s Clean Suit explores the perennial implications of Boltzman’s famous entropy law – later inscribed on this tombstone as S = k log W.
 
Starring Emma Fielding as Elsa and Richard Johnson as her father, Papa’s Clean Suit was commissioned for Radio 4’s Friday Play slot.