WVAC: 7 Seconds of Eternity

Neither biopic nor tribute, acclaimed Austrian playwright Peter Turrini’s bold solo play places Hedy Lamarr at the centre of her own reckoning. The icon of Hollywood’s Golden Age appears not as an object of nostalgia but as witness, accuser and defence, interrogating the forces that shaped her life and distorted her legacy.

Framed by the infamous seven-second nude scene that came to eclipse her career, the play moves restlessly between celebrity scandal, exile and erasure, exposing the cost of being remembered as an image while one’s intellect is ignored. As Lamarr addresses the audience directly, the boundaries between public myth and private memory collapse. Her voice ranges from caustic wit to fury, from vulnerability to dark unsparing humour, as she confronts the exploitation of her body, the theft of her ideas and the persistent refusal to recognise her work as a co-inventor of frequency hopping technology, a foundation of modern wireless communication.

In this staged reading, Nicole Ansari Cox lends her voice to Lamarr’s testimony, allowing the character to speak back to history with clarity and defiance. The play offers an uncompromising portrait of a woman reclaiming authorship of her own story and a sharp meditation on fame, misogyny,and the long shadow cast by cultural amnesia.