'The Lightest Element' review — a brilliant female scientist battles the patriarchy in this enlightening bio-drama

Read our review of The Lightest Element, starring Maureen Beattie as the trailblazing Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, now in performances at Hampstead Theatre to 12 October.

Hydrogen is the “lightest element” referenced in the title of Stella Feehily’s new play, which, to its credit, isn’t the heavy going lecture-in-disguise that plays about science can sometimes be.

Indeed, the 95 minutes – no interval – of Alice Hamilton’s sympathetic production relate a familiar paradigm: the individual against the system, in this instance the trailblazing scientist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) who did battle for much of her life against an unyielding patriarchy. The relevance of the story of “Mrs G” (as she was called) to today’s times is readily apparent.

We first encounter that fine Irish actress Maureen Beattie in the role at a defining moment two years before Payne-Gaposchkin’s death. The astronomical whiz is being given a lifetime achievement award that allows Feehily conveniently to rewind the clock as we trace Payne-Gaposchkin’s career ascent. It’s a wintry day in 1925, and she is at loggerheads with one of many obstructive senior colleagues: Julian Wadham’s Henry Norris Russell, the American astronomer.

Some of the elders in her path at least stand their oppositional ground from the off. Russell is sneakier, commending Payne-Gaposchkin for answering the “call” of science before going in for the kill. “You are impertinent,” he chastises the brilliant young academician, before making clear his readiness to stand in her way.

Success against the odds is always bracing to encounter, and Payne-Gaposchkin does find support. Fred Whipple (Simon Chandler), her Harvard predecessor, is keen to hand over the reins, but not without tainting her by association: it’s McCarthy-era America and her Russian husband Sergei (unseen in the play) has been accused of communist sympathies.

A subsequent interview with the Harvard Crimson is arrived at with reluctance, the journalist in question (a rather wet performance from Annie Kingsnorth) seen sliding towards a dependence on alcohol complicated by this unwed woman’s pregnancy.

The abiding point, voiced pretty much on cue, is that our heroine is herself the “lightest element”: an “incongruity” (her word) in a male world that admits for an uneasy embrace. A series of face-offs gives way near play’s end to an assemblage of men in suits seen deciding her fate, Payne-Gaposchkin rather improbably hovering unnoticed so that she can announce herself just in time to assert her worth.

The arc of the play is preordained from the outset, and its sentiments – laudable down the line – feel delivered by rote, as if to reiterate afresh the disgraceful disregard that is the fate of too many women of professional note.

A climactic roll call of names reminds us that one’s relegation to the sidelines of history is an ongoing concern. I doubt I was the only playgoer put in mind of the 2015 Nicole Kidman West End star vehicle, Photograph 51, about another scientist, Rosalind Franklin. That play possessed a tang that the comparatively staid Lightest Element simply doesn’t have.

Feehily’s dramatic strategy brings in a research assistant, Rona (Rina Mahoney, sporting a dodgy American accent), who can fill in her boss’s biography as required.

And Beattie, as always, is a hugely welcome stage presence, her flintiness a commanding foil to any and all oppressors on the way to a poetic finale invoking a more immediate male figure in Payne-Gaposchkin’s own father. Even to the end, a man gets the last word.

The Lightest Element is at Hampstead Theatre through 12 October. Book The Lightest Element tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: The Lightest Element (Photographs by Mark Douet)