You could hardly have a greater contrast than with Nicole Kidman’s last appearance on the London stage. In David Hare’s The Blue Room (1998) she played 10 starkly revealing women in a sexual daisy-chain. Now she plays the scientist Rosalind Franklin who eschewed intimate relationships and whose vital contribution to uncovering the structure of DNA has been marginalised. It’s a commanding, intelligent performance and my only complaint about Anna Ziegler’s intriguing, informative 95-minute play is that it is not longer.
Like Ziegler, Kidman avoids presenting Franklin as a stereotyped bluestocking. It is clear, from when we first see her quitting a Parisian research post, that she is a woman capable of companionable warmth. But, on arriving at London’s King’s College on a fellowship in 1951, Franklin is immediately placed on the back foot.
Reacting with understandable hostility to the news that she is expected to assist the molecular biologist, Maurice Wilkins, in his work on x-ray crystallography, Franklin increasingly retreats into her own world. Even when she comes up with crucial evidence that the structure of DNA must be a double helix, she finds that the photographic proof passes, via Wilkins, into the hands of James Watson and Francis Crick at Cambridge.
The three men go on to win a Nobel prize by which time Franklin has died from ovarian cancer.
It is a fascinating story and Kidman’s performance captures the complexities in Franklin’s character. Kidman bridles at the routine sexism of academic life, rejects Wilkins’s cack-handed attempts to win her over and looks nervously away when a sympathetic American colleague invites her to dinner. But Kidman also conveys the ecstasy of scientific discovery: her features acquire a luminous intensity as she stares at the photograph that reveals the helix pattern. Even when confronted by the news of her twin tumours, Kidman determinedly propels herself back to the laboratory. It is a fine performance in which Kidman reminds us that the scientific life can be informed by private passion.
All this emerges from Ziegler’s text. Ziegler also plays fair in suggesting that Franklin was the victim both of clannish male opportunism and her own reluctance to pursue theoretical speculation. But I would like to have heard more about this.
Although it’s not in the play, Franklin posted a notice in the King’s physics department, even after she had uncovered the photographic evidence, saying that “It is with great regret that we have to announce the death, on Friday 18th July 1952, of DNA helix.” What prompted that? And, although a visit to Peter Brook’s production of The Winter’s Tale in the summer of 1951 is integral to the action, we never learn anything of Franklin’s tastes in music and literature.
What the play does do is correct a historical injustice and ask, by implication, whether women are still sidelined in the scientific world. Michael Grandage’s production – for which 25% of seats are available at £10 on the day – matches the text in swiftness and clarity and is beautifully designed by Christopher Oram: the set hints at the grimy classical grandeur of the King’s College quad and the rubble of the bomb-afflicted postwar London. The play is also anything but a one-person show. Stephen Campbell Moore catches perfectly the obduracy and awkwardness of Maurice Wilkins, forever tugging at his slightly too-long sleeves. Edward Bennett and Will Attenborough make Crick and Watson a genuine odd couple: the former all tweedy jocularity and the latter brimming with precocious certainty under a shock of wayward hair. Even if the play could go still further, it proves that science is inherently dramatic and that the neglect of Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to uncovering the secret of life remains a blot on our history.
• At Noël Coward theatre, London, until 21 November. Buy tickets from the Guardian Box Office or call 0330-333 6906.
