An Experiment With An Air Pump takes place in a house in Newcastle upon Tyne and follows two stories that occur 200 years apart, in 1799 and 1999. Though the play switches between these two timelines, for the sake of clarity, this summary will present the stories one at a time.
The play opens with the cast frozen in place in a physical recreation of Joseph Wright’s famous 1768 painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump—a painting in which a scientist places a bird into an air pump with the intention of starving it of oxygen. The cast remains frozen in place around Fenwick, the scientist. When the characters unfreeze, Fenwick’s twin daughters, Maria and Harriet, watch with horror as their father seals the air pump and cuts off the air supply of Maria’s pet bird, whom she named after her fiancé, Edward. Luckily, Fenwick successfully performs the experiment, and the bird survives.
Sometime later, Fenwick is working at his desk. Roget, a scientist, reads Fenwick the lecture proposals that scientists have submitted for Fenwick’s upcoming New Year’s Eve lecture series. Fenwick is disappointed that none of the proposals embody the revolutionary spirit of the Enlightenment and rejects all of them. Armstrong, a brilliant young scientist who is staying with the Fenwicks, accuses Fenwick of rejecting proposals based on his personal feelings about their authors rather than on the proposals’ scientific merit. Susannah, Fenwick’s wife, drinks brandy off to the side; she tries to participate in the men’s conversation, but Fenwick ignores or cuts her off before she can say much of anything. Meanwhile, an angry mob of rioters is outside protesting the monarchy’s tax on fish. Though Fenwick thinks that this riot will be mostly ineffectual, he’s confident that once knowledge spreads throughout the masses, people will reject the monarchy in favor of a democracy, and England will undergo a real revolution.
Maria, Harriet, and the Fenwick family’s Scottish domestic servant Isobel enter to ask Fenwick if he’s ready to see them perform a play that Harriet wrote, which she describes as “a hymn to progress.” Harriet’s character in the play represents progress and industry, Maria’s represents “pastoral innocence”—meanwhile, Isobel is forced to play a simple sheep and has only “infantile” lines. But Fenwick claims he’s too busy to see the play; this deeply upsets Harriet, who admires her father and wants to be a scientist like him. Fenwick’s relationship with Susannah is equally fraught; he doesn’t take her seriously because she’s more interested in art than in science, and he frequently patronizes and insults her. Susannah, meanwhile, mocks her husband’s morally upstanding persona, insinuating that he’s not quite so philanthropic and radical as he’d like to think, and that Armstrong, Roget, and Fenwick’s other admirers let their admiration blind them to the less savory parts of Fenwick’s personality.
Isobel, though not formally educated, is smart and insightful. She also has a malformed, twisted back. Armstrong is abnormally interested in Isobel—and in her back specifically; he makes repeated efforts to woo her, telling her that she’s beautiful and attempting to kiss her. Isobel is initially skeptical of Armstrong’s advances—she’s never had a suitor before. Yet Armstrong insists that he loves her—he even gifts her a book of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and, later, a gold necklace. Despite her initial skepticism, Isobel warms to Armstrong and develops feelings for him. It’s immediately clear that Armstrong is just using Isobel, though he repeatedly denies it, even as Roget continually demands that Armstrong reveal his true intentions with Isobel. Roget and Armstrong also clash over Dr Farleigh’s anatomy demonstrations, which Armstrong attends frequently—the bodies that Dr Farleigh dissects are the recently buried dead whom Farleigh has acquired through the illicit body-snatching market, and Roget doesn’t think this is right. Armstrong thinks that stealing dead bodies isn’t a big deal, though, especially if the dissections lead to valuable scientific discoveries.
Armstrong eventually confesses to Roget that he finds Isobel’s twisted back scientifically and erotically arousing and wants to convince her to have sex with him so he can see her naked back—he sees her as an object of pity and morbid curiosity, not as an object of affection. Roget calls Armstrong a monster. Unbeknownst to Roget and Armstrong, Isobel overhears Armstrong’s admission and spirals into a state of despair. She ultimately hangs herself, leaving behind a suicide note that indirectly implicates Armstrong in her decision to end her life. But Armstrong discovers the letter and hides it before the others can see it. He also suffocates Isobel’s nearly dead body to speed up the dying process. The 1799 timeline (and the play as a whole) ends with everyone gathered around Isobel’s coffin, once more arranged to suggest the Joseph Wright painting that began the play. As the clock strikes midnight, welcoming in the first year of the 19th century, Fenwick toasts to life’s uncertainties.
In the same house 200 years later, Ellen, a 40-something research scientist who now owns Fenwick’s house, packs boxes—she and her husband, Tom, a recently unemployed literature professor, are moving out of their house. Though the house has been in Ellen’s family for generations, the upkeep is too expensive. Kate, Ellen’s colleague, has come to help Ellen pack—and to ensure that Ellen gives her an answer about accepting a job offer with her company. Ellen has been doing groundbreaking work on the Human Genome Project, and Kate’s company wants to fund Ellen’s research and make it available to the masses. Ellen has procrastinated giving Kate an answer about the job, though, as Tom has major misgivings about it, and Ellen herself worries about the ethical ramifications of making gene editing available to the masses.
Phil, a builder who is conducting a building survey in preparation to sell the house, appears at various points in the 1999 timeline, often for comic relief (Phil subscribes to numerous kooky conspiracy theories, like spontaneous combustion, which he energetically debates with Ellen, who oscillates between dully debunking and humoring him). Phil also weighs in on Ellen’s predicament about accepting an offer with Kate’s company and about Ellen and Kate’s genetic research in general. Phil is skeptical of scientists like Ellen and Kate and the work they do; he thinks that humans don’t have a right to meddle with nature and so believes that Ellen’s work on the Human Genome Project is immoral and bad for society. Kate, meanwhile, believes that scientific advancement is always good, and so she vehemently condemns Phil’s “backward” logic, suggesting that people like him (and Tom) are holding humanity back.
The tension between Ellen and Tom (and in a broader sense, between science’s proponents and science’s skeptics) becomes more acute when Tom discovers a box of bones hidden underneath the kitchen sink. The bones are Isobel’s—a fact made evident by the skeleton’s missing vertebrae, which the audience can assume Armstrong removed when he dissected Isobel’s fresh corpse, though it’s never made explicit that this is what happened to her and none of the modern characters ever discover whom the bones belong to. Though Tom’s discovery hardly fazes Kate and Ellen (who see the bones as a meaningless object, not the remains of a person who once existed and mattered), it disturbs Tom to think that he and Ellen have been living above a dead girl’s bones for so many years,
Eventually, Tom and Ellen sit down and have an honest discussion about Ellen’s work, a topic that Tom has avoided talking about up to this point. Through this conversation, they find that their respective interests of art and science are equally driven by passion and are both vital, complementary parts of the human experience. This timeline ends on New Year’s Eve, 1999. With this, 200 years after the earlier timeline’s characters grieved Isobel and toasted to an unpredictable and unknowable future, Tom and Ellen greet the new millennium with a parallel appreciation for the uncertainty that characterizes the years ahead.
