All the elements are there – but scientist Nicole is a tad frosty
As Kidman returns to the London stage, the Mail’s critic says...
SCIENCE is not easy to portray on stage but Michael Grandage’s fluent direction and Nicole Kidman’s stellar control make Photograph 51 – a play about microscopic images of DNA – a gripping, if slightly frosty affair.
This show clicks l i ke the shutter of a hi-tech laboratory camera. Its picture is clear, detailed, ambitious; a l i ttle stark and negative in places, too, though.
Miss Kidman plays Rosalind Franklin, the socially awkward X- ray crystallographer whose research helped Francis Crick, James Watson and the l esserknown Maurice Wilkins win a Nobel prize. Franklin might have been a co-recipient of that prize had she lived. By then, alas, the spinster had been claimed by ovarian cancer.
This is not, thank goodness, one of those science shows that use clever graphics and back- projection gizmos to convey boffinry. The set shows the bombed-out, blackened shell of King’s College London.
When the scientists gather round a model of DNA we have to imagine it, for there is nothing there but thin air. (I presume this is intentional and the props department had not merely mislaid the thing!) Yet we become caught up in the quest to identify DNA, a race that was won in 1953 by Cambridge’s Crick and Watson. Franklin, in London, had taken the X-ray – Photograph 51 – that was crucial to their discovery. If this play is to be believed, the photograph’s secret was effectively stolen by a sly Watson – and by almost negligent naiveté on the part of Franklin’s laboratory partner Wilkins.
Will Attenborough’s Watson is a glinty- eyed competitor with a wonky head of curls and one of those hairy suits chaps wore in the early 1950s. Edward Bennett, who really should play Prince Andrew one day, makes Crick more urbane and diplomatic than his frenzied colleague.
Wilkins, as portrayed by Stephen Campbell Moore and playwright Anna Ziegler, is implausibly stiff and dim. Drama may demand a fall-guy but the real Wilkins can surely not have been quite this arid and unaware.
That, and a heavy hand on the pen when it comes to portraying Franklin as feminist pioneer – the play strives too strenuously for a theme of victimhood – are the only bum notes.
Miss Kidman has the willowy looks of the young Queen Elizabeth II. Aged 48, she just about passes for this 30-something scientist. She is not quite dark enough for Franklin and I could have done with her making this devoted scientist a little less detached.
She could do with some of Mr Attenborough’s animation. Franklin was a brave, brilliant Jewish intellectual. Miss Kidman makes her more like something out of Brief Encounter or Rattigan at his most repressed.
There is complete confidence about her on stage. We need never worry that she i s not entirely consumed by the role. But do we weep at Franklin’s fate? When, in a passage near the end, she talks of her desire to be kissed, does it chime with the way Miss Kidman has played her? I was not wholly convinced. This brilliant X- ray scientist could have been a little more transparent, showing a little more flesh and blood.