SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Before writing this play – before descending, imaginatively at least, into the strange darkness of Betina Cave – I knew roughly as much about Marin Getaldić as most people in Croatia probably do. His name drifted somewhere between a schoolbook footnote and a certain optician’s shop window. A mathematician, perhaps. A scientist. A vaguely important Ragusan mind from the Renaissance. One of those names we inherit respectfully, while quietly hoping someone else remembers the details.

Then I encountered the story of the cave.

A man stands beneath the cliffs outside Dubrovnik holding mirrors toward the morning sun. Tiny model ships wait upon the water. Smoke begins to rise from wood touched only by light. The watching crowd whispers. Some cross themselves. Others retreat in silence. Soon the city begins calling him a wizard. And suddenly the story became theatre. Not simply because of the visual beauty of it – though it possesses that in abundance – but because it revealed something much larger and stranger: that fragile historical moment when science still resembled sorcery, when mathematics still felt dangerous, and when a man studying optics could easily become a figure of suspicion, rumour, or myth.

I have always been fascinated by that threshold.

The borderlands between illusion and discovery. Between alchemy and astronomy. Between theatrical trickery and genuine revelation. Smoke and mirrors are, after all, the oldest tools of both magicians and theatre-makers. The Renaissance itself often feels like a stage suspended between two worlds: medieval darkness slowly giving way to reason, while still haunted by superstition, omens, symbols, prophecies, and invisible correspondences.

Even Isaac Newton searched for hidden codes in Scripture and experimented with alchemy. John Dee conversed with angels while helping shape navigation and empire. The modern world did not emerge cleanly from reason alone. It emerged through confusion, obsession, imagination, fear, and wonder.

And Marin Getaldić stands precisely there.

A mathematician of extraordinary intelligence. A diplomat. An optician. A traveller moving through England, France, Italy and the Low Countries in pursuit of knowledge and intellectual companionship. A man fascinated by symbolic algebra, geometry, light, mirrors and the invisible architecture hidden beneath the visible world. And yet also a man trapped. Following a duel in Rome, Getaldić found himself forced back into Dubrovnik, unable to continue the wider intellectual life he longed for abroad. In letters, he described Dubrovnik almost as a tomb. That image haunted me immediately: a brilliant mind returning home unfinished, pacing within the beautiful limitations of a small republic suspended between sea and stone. It somehow felt deeply contemporary.

Because many artists, scientists and intellectuals from smaller nations understand this paradox instinctively. Recognition often arrives elsewhere first. The horizon always seems to lie abroad. One leaves in search of possibility and returns carrying both knowledge and exile within oneself.

And then there is the cave itself. Betina Cave is not merely a location. It feels mythological. Accessible today only by sea, hidden beneath the cliffs, it once connected to the family estate above through a steep and dangerous staircase that no longer exists. Even before writing a single line, I could already hear the sound design of the piece: waves beneath stone, distant echoes, breathing darkness, fragments of reflected light trembling across the walls like broken constellations.

It did not feel like the setting for a historical biography. It felt like memory. The more I researched Getaldić, the clearer it became that the play could not proceed in a straightforward chronological manner. The facts of his life are fascinating, but they are not “dramatic” in the conventional theatrical sense. His true drama lies elsewhere: in thought, isolation, obsession, exile, imagination, and the terrifying beauty of trying to understand the universe while surrounded by people who suspect you may be summoning demons.

So the structure gradually transformed into something more dreamlike. A chamber piece. A memory play. A solitary figure inside a cave reconstructing his life through reflections, fragments, mirrors, projections, stars, rumours, equations, and sea-light. A man who spent his life attempting to bring clarity to the world, only to discover that reality itself keeps breaking apart into reflections. The cave became laboratory, theatre, prison, sanctuary, observatory, and tomb all at once. And naturally, because I cannot entirely resist theatrical playfulness, it also became a stage inhabited by ghosts, commedia echoes, sea monsters, scholars, drowned sailors, mirrors, and mathematical spells disguised as equations.

In many ways, this piece continues conversations I began years earlier in Rougher Magic, my play inspired by the life of John Dee. I remain fascinated by individuals standing on the edge of historical transformation: people who sense the future arriving before the rest of the world possesses the language to describe it. Such figures often appear absurd or dangerous to their contemporaries because they are looking slightly beyond the visible horizon. Getaldić seems to me one of those people. Not merely a Croatian scientist deserving respectful commemoration, but a profoundly theatrical figure. Solitary. Brilliant. Restless. Melancholic. Occasionally comic. A man capable of turning sunlight into flame while still being forced to spend much of his life dealing with diplomacy, administration, inheritance disputes, and the exhausting practicalities of survival.

That contradiction also moved me deeply. History tends to imagine great minds existing permanently inside moments of revelation. In reality, most genius survives through paperwork, exhaustion, compromise, patronage, accounting, delayed travel arrangements, politics, and badly paid obligations. Getaldić might have transformed mathematics further still had circumstance allowed it. Yet perhaps the tragedy – and beauty – of his life lies precisely there: in the distance between potential and possibility.

This production was commissioned to mark the 400th anniversary of Marin Getaldić’s death, and it feels strangely fitting that the play returns him to the cave where legend and history still blur together. The production itself could not exist without collaborators capable of embracing both its intellectual and imaginative demands. Thomas Michealson brings extraordinary sensitivity, humour and humanity to the role of Getaldić, while director Paul Anthony Morris – with whom I previously collaborated on Conundrum at the Young Vic and later in Rijeka during the European Capital of Culture programme – understands instinctively how to balance theatricality with emotional intimacy.

Because ultimately this is not a lecture disguised as theatre. Nor is it simply a historical reconstruction. It is a meditation on light. On reflection. On loneliness. On knowledge. On illusion. On the dangerous beauty of curiosity. And perhaps above all, it is about the strange human need to keep searching even when certainty remains impossible.

Getaldić spent his life studying mirrors, yet the play gradually revealed something unexpected to me: mirrors do not truly preserve anything. They only borrow light briefly before releasing it again. Theatre may not be so different. For an hour or two, we gather shadows, voices, memories and reflections inside darkness. Then they vanish. The audience departs. The cave empties. Only fragments remain.

But sometimes, if we are fortunate, the light lingers a little longer on the walls.  

Filip Krenus

Marin Getaldić (Marino Ghetaldi, 1568–1626) was a Dubrovnik mathematician, physicist, diplomat, optician, and one of the most significant scientific minds of the late Renaissance. Celebrated throughout Europe for his work in geometry and optics, he belonged to the intellectual circle that transformed the foundations of mathematics and natural philosophy at the dawn of the modern age.

Educated in Dubrovnik before travelling extensively through England, France, Italy, and the Low Countries, Getaldić came into contact with some of the greatest scientific figures of his era, including François Viète, Christopher Clavius, and Galileo Galilei. Deeply influenced by the emerging language of symbolic algebra, he helped unite algebra and geometry in ways that anticipated later developments in analytic mathematics.

Among his most important works are Promotus Archimedis (1603), Nonnullae propositiones de parabola (1603), and Apollonius Redivivus (1607, 1613), devoted to geometry, parabolic mirrors, optics, and the reconstruction of lost classical mathematics. His experiments with burning mirrors and reflected light became legendary in Dubrovnik, where local stories gradually transformed the scientist into a mysterious “wizard” associated with Betina Cave beneath the family estate outside the city walls.

Getaldić lived during a period when science still stood dangerously close to magic in the public imagination. Mirrors that ignited ships, lenses that altered vision, and mathematical symbols describing invisible truths appeared almost supernatural to ordinary observers. Yet behind the legends stood a restless and rigorous mind attempting to understand light, space, proportion, and the hidden order of the universe.

Following a duel in Rome, Getaldić was effectively prevented from continuing the wider European life he had envisioned for himself and returned to Dubrovnik, which he once described in letters as feeling “like a tomb.” Nevertheless, many of his most important scientific works were created during this final period of isolation.

Written to mark the 400th anniversary of Marin Getaldić’s death, A Wizard in the Cave is not intended as a literal biography, but as a poetic meditation on memory, exile, science, illusion, and the fragile border between reason and wonder. Like the fragmented reflections within the cave itself, the play approaches Getaldić through shards: letters, legends, equations, rumours, mirrors, and sea-light.

Four centuries after his death, Marin Getaldić remains one of the great – and still too little known – figures of the Croatian Renaissance.