WATCH OUT FOR . . .
GEMMA CHAN (right) who more than holds her own as the sole woman in Jamie Lloyd’s scorching production of Harold Pinter’s play The Homecoming, which also includes an electrifying performance by Ron Cook. The great ensemble includes John Simm, John Macmillan, Gary Kemp and Keith Allen. They all inject a fresh vitality into the 50-yearold play about menace and desire that’s now on at London’s Trafalgar Studios under the banner of the Jamie Lloyd Company and the Ambassador Theatre Group. Michael Grandage’s show at the Noel Coward Theatre and was struck by how absolutely convincing Kidman is as the brilliant, no-nonsense, unheralded discoverer of the DNA double helix.
After the play, Kidman joined Grandage and fellow cast members Stephen Campbell Moore, Will Attenborough, Edward Bennett, Patrick Kennedy and Joshua Silver on stage for aQ & A with alumni from Franklin’s alma mater, Newnham College at Cambridge University.
Kidman said that when she first read Ziegler’s play, she cried because she felt deeply about what Franklin achieved. Yet Kidman’s portrait of Franklin is without sentimentality.
The actress now embarks on three back-to-back projects: film How To Talk To Girls At Parties and TV dramas Top Of The Lake 2 and Big Little Lies with Reese Witherspoon for HBO.
Further down the road, she hopes to take Photograph 51 to Australia, then to New York and then to make a film version, though the order in which they will happen hasn’t yet been determined.