A Halifax woman found an unproduced play written by her grandfather. It opens next month

Halifax professor Karen Harper never met her grandfather.

But after discovering an unproduced play he wrote in the 1950s in the attic of her parents' home in Ontario, she made it her mission to bring it to the stage. 

Harper's grandparents, Gladys Isabel Mackenzie Harper and Wallace Russell Harper, were physicists who married while studying at the University of Cambridge in England in the late 1920s.

While she knew her grandmother well — and was deeply proud of her groundbreaking work as a woman in the male-dominated field of physics — her grandfather died before she got a chance to know him. 

She knew him mostly as a professor who wrote textbooks, but never as a creative writer. That made the discovery of his work a surprise. 

"I've always looked up to my grandmother, but now I'm getting to know my grandfather as well," said Harper.

Play unearthed by father

For many years, the play collected dust in a crawlspace at her parents home in Georgian Bay, Ont.

Harper's father rediscovered it as he geared up to move into a retirement home. 

"It was really important for him to go through it with me and to pass on the knowledge," she said in an interview with Mainstreet Nova Scotia on Wednesday. 

The box included poems, a manuscript and an unproduced play, inspired in part by her grandfather's work as a physicist. 

The play explores what happens when a man who works at a nuclear power station and his cat become exposed to radiation.

"It's exploring the safety of nuclear energy, but also there's a sense of humour about the play as well," she said. 

Opens next month

After reading the play, and being struck by its quality and resonance, Harper decided to try to see if anyone would be willing to mount a production.

"I couldn't believe that my grandfather put so much time and effort into writing this," she said. "I just felt like I almost had a responsibility to … carry through and to see it performed."

After attempting without success to get something off the ground in Halifax, she reached out to the University of Cambridge.

She soon found a group of students eager to take it on. Approximately 70 years after it was first written, Not for a Cat: A Play for the Nuclear Age will premiere there on April 5.  

It will be followed by a discussion by Cambridge academics about the history and science behind the play.

Harper will be in the audience that night.