The Lightest Elements @ Hampstead Theatre, London
Can a woman be a woman, a wife, a mother and a professional scientist? Or Chair of Astronomy? Or head up a Harvard department whilst having a family? Or be acknowledged for having new ideas and new knowledge about the make-up of stars? We encounter Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (Maureen Beattie) as she waits to be appointed Chair of Astronomy and the first woman to head a Harvard department in 1956 facing just these dilemmas and assumptions.
At the same time, Sally Kane (Annie Kingsnorth) is being primed by her boyfriend and editor of the student newspaper to interview Professor Payne-Gaposchkin and get some Communist dirt to dish. Only it’s much more complicated than that — the Professor’s husband is Russian in the McCarthy suspicion era; she does have to face lots of challenging views to move her theories about the composition of stars forward — and even that married women can have careers — or be scientifically curious.
Comic foil to all of this is the efficient Rona Stewart (Rina Mahoney) who knows where everything is and keeps Payne-Gaposchkin’s office and desk from disappearing under papers. In the background is a starry constellation and presumably scientific workings out.
Tension mounts as various meetings are held — media and scientific about who will get the Chair, and as Payne-Gaposchkin’s prepares for her lecture. The exposure is not what Kane expects nor her editorial boyfriend nor Payne-Gaposchkin — there is no dirt to dish, only the wonders of scientific discovery and ideas, and hidden in the background, three children.
Whilst we get a sense of the scientist in the play, less so the woman — and it’s not always clear from the material what her ideas were about or why she was remarkable. The starry lighting effects suggest this (by trying to be a stagey Interstellar), but it would have been intriguing to know more! The play’s content was mostly talked through, in the forms of departmental meetings and coffee shops hang-outs, and whilst engaging, would have benefitted from being two acts long to allow for breadth and depth and more of this extraordinary woman’s life to come through.
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