“One of the characteristics of technology is that it always gets away from its creator and begins to live a life of its own,” says narrator Anthony Ingram in Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla. The crux of the problem for any inventor but especially so for Nikola Tesla, the central character rocketing through Belfry Theatre’s latest incarnation.

Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre could not have asked for a more intriguing character to put under the bright lights.

Tesla, a late 19th-century inventor who died in 1943 thought up much of what we play with today: the radio, AC current, remote control, wireless communication, the Internet. An employee turned rival of Thomas Edison, Tesla’s star flamed out when his revolutionary ideas became reviled rather than revered.

First performed at the Vancouver Fringe festival in 1996, the play has travelled across Canada and to Scotland in the years since. But this Belfry production is unique for including for the first time a chorus in a 80-minute set that chronicles Tesla’s arrival in America, his rise to fame, and decline.

Tesla’s rivalry with Thomas Edison is key to the plot, as is his hesitant friendship with an admiring couple, Century magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson and his wife, Katherine, admirably played by Greg Spottiswood and Kerry Sandomirsky.

The duo provides grounding for Tesla and the audience as the couple who befriend and ultimately betray the inventor. Just as Tesla needs occasional reality checks, so the audience needs a verbal and visual balance in this spare script with its nevertheless vibrant current.

Jonathan Young, one of the founders of Electric Company Theatre, has certainly nailed the oddly charismatic underdog character we root for in Tesla. And Ingram, doubling up as narrator is also a pragmatically cheerful, yet bordering on evil, Edison.

But what really shines in this production is not the brilliant protégé turned mad scientist plot. Ditto, the perfunctory dialogue. What matters, and rightly so for a character obsessed with electrical current, is movement. The chorus is the swirling alcohol in this evening punch. Whether as drone workers steaming inside silver boxes in Edison’s lab or tap dancing behind Edison as he electrocutes a kitten (implied, folks, implied), five Victoria actors (Victor Dolhai, Trevor Hinton, Elliott Loran, Meghan Porteous and Kholby Wardell) dance up a mostly mute but visually stunning accompaniment.

In one sequence depicting Tesla at his peak the audience is a motion picture projector as the actors jerk perfectly out of time across the stage, with Tesla glancing awkwardly into the crowd or camera lens. Watching for a slip up or missed step is delightfully fruitless: this troupe knows their stuff and knows how to strut it.

In another sequence, Cori Caulfield’s choreography steps right up again when Tesla demonstrates the difference between DC and AC current by striding into a snapping AC flamenco, humiliating Edison’s DC tap dance routine.

Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla runs at Belfry Theatre, 1291 Gladstone Ave. until Dec. 14. For tickets call 250-385-6815 or go tobelfry.bc.ca.

vmoreau@saanichnews.com