Who remembers when Pluto was stripped of its planetary status in 2006? Who protested loudly against it then, joining the chorus of the ninth planet’s fans? In whom did the excitement resurface when, in 2015, the New Horizons probe delivered the first high-resolution images of Pluto to Earth, and it turned out to be exceptionally beautiful? Certainly in Mateusz Pakuła, who in Pluto p-brane presents the story of the discovery of Planet X.
'Yes. It’s going to be a cosmic story. It’s going to be a story that happened and that at the same time rather didn’t happen. That is, yes, it is based on a biography, it feeds on the so-called true life of a true human being, who really existed, yet at the same time, it allows for plenty of fabrications'
– Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, announces at the beginning of the play. Before Clyde, however, it was Percival Lowell who was the main proponent of its existence and a fierce explorer of Planet X. You may remember him as the author of the theory of the existence of a Martian civilisation that inspired Wells' War of the Worlds.
Pakuła's 'Cosmic story' presents a number of versions of the improbable meeting between Lowell, who was ridiculed in the scientific community, and Clyde, the actual discoverer of Pluto. However, Pakuła makes no attempt to predict the likely course of such an encounter, instead playing with the very possibility of it in a series of brilliant and amusing scenes that verge on the absurd. Once, Percival destroys the paper model of the Solar System that Clyde brought him as a gift, complaining that this ‘crap made out of celluloid’ has the wrong proportions. At other times, Percival is a jaded, clown-like paranoiac who fiercely pretends to be out of it.
Although one can hardly find seriousness in Pakuła's historical play, it is by no means meaningless. Somewhere between the frivolous jokes, references to pop culture and science, but also letters from Martians or the author's songs mixed with historical facts, a long-lost dream rears its head, the afterimages of which we can see in the story about the discovery of Pluto. A dream of discovery for the sheer joy of discovery, of knowledge without purpose. And perhaps also (at least a little) of blurring the boundaries between art and science. We have lost the ability to marvel at the universe, Pakuła seems to be saying. However, he himself has certainly not lost it, as evidenced by Clyde's final monologue, in which the story of black holes, trillions of galaxies and trillions of stars, instead of becoming a boring lesson, is transformed into a rousing appeal – more stories! Because only they can make sense of the immensity of the cosmos.