The Lightest Element

Hampstead Theatre, 07/09/24

Credit: Mark Douet

Final rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Stella Feehily explores in her new play how sexist male astronomy professors took credit for women’s discoveries. It specifically focuses on the life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of sceince’s most overlooked figures. She is the person who first discovered what stars were made of, and in turn was appointed the first female full professor at Harvard. Throughout the play, we follow her quest to become the Chair of Astronomy – a title she has more than proved she is worthy of – amongst competition from entitled pensioners and an attempted smear campaign to portray her as a Communist sympathiser (she has a Russian husband, hence the surname).

My overall feeling, though, is that too much effort was placed on attempting historical accuracy (and don’t get me wrong, a dense biographical depiction requires studious research). But character development and action suffer as a result. Some scenes felt poorly paced, adding little excitement or characterisation to the people in front of us.

I particularly enjoyed Cecilia’s interview with aspiring journalist Sally, put up to ask some inappropriate and reaching questions by her creepy, intimidating boyfriend (who is later revealed to be a sleeper agent). This is a great scene – with awkwardness, anger, hilarity, which culminates in Cecilia opening a bottle of Polish vodka and speaking more liberally. It was a fun way to draw the audience’s attention to the impact of prejudice on progress.

Now – I’ve resisted mentioning it thus far but I feel I have to – I went to watch on night 4, which was supposed to be the last of the previews. However, I discovered that the previous previews had to be cancelled last minute due to undisclosed ‘technical issues’, so when I saw it, it was actually their first run of the show. Unfortunately, you could really tell. Sarah Beaton’s spinning stage was a bit of a disaster. I believe this was the reason behind the ‘technical issues’. The actors clearly had barely performed with the stage working, as furniture was very awkwardly wheeled on, and then a tussle took place to align the legs/wheels with the taped markings. The scene transitions were subsequently very clunky and too long. This culminated in a painful moment, where, having watched Rona set up a group of chairs and music stands for an orchestra, Norman knocks them all over by mistake when running off from his scene in the diner. We then have an even longer interlude as Rona sets them all up again. Additionally, there’s a huge curved LED screen above the stage, which is occasionally used to indicate a place or a time at the start of a scene. But, given the play’s subject matter being – you know, stars – the screen felt heavily underused.

It was a shame for the actors that the technical problems plagued what unfolded on stage, and Maureen Beattie’s Cecilia in particular was exceptional. That said, the script wasn’t compelling enough despite a few fun moments, with little character development throughout. There was also an excruciating moment when Professor Russell (Julian Wadham) totally forgot his lines, and there was nothing anyone could do to rescue him, and instead he got stuck in a loop until he eventually figured it out. His diction was also very poor, and I struggled to hear him most of the time, which is pretty poor considering I was a mere three rows from the front. At least the play didn’t outstay its welcome, at 90 minutes straight through. I wanted to like this more than I did, but its problems let it down, and as such I could only enjoy elements of the production.