Review: THE LIGHTEST ELEMENT, Hampstead Theatre

Two plays for the price of one sounds like an enticing offer. Stella Feehily’s biography of astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is a fist clenched rally cry denouncing patriarchal politics and saluting the woman pioneer who discovered that stars were primarily composed of hydrogen and helium. At the same time it is a noirish thriller about McCarthyistic paranoia bleeding through institutions. Both story strands clamour for attention. Both eventually push each other out of focus.

Maureen Beattie is Payne-Gaposchkin stalking the barren stage with a hawkish glare. We meet her at the end of her career, lips always puckered to welcome a cigarette, haggard eyebrows etched in a permanent scowl. She is world wearied. Fighting on the front lines against patriarchal constraints whilst climbing to the top of her academic field becoming the first woman to head a Harvard department, has taken its toll.

Snippets of her illustrious career unravel scene by scene, stitched together with a dreamlike levity courtesy of Sarah Beaton’s rotating stage. Drippy minimalist xylophones, the kind of thing that murmurs in the background of a Brian Cox documentary, accompany the science lingo, whilst projections of flickering constellations flare above the stage.

Opposite her Annie Kingsnorth plays Annie, a wide-eyed Radcliffe student sent to interview her for the Harvard Crimson. Her waspish boyfriend thinks it’s an opportunity to coerce her into digging up dirt on Payne-Gaposchkin’s communist ties and Russian husband.

Any biographical play must overcome the challenge of wrangling dramatic intensity from real world truth. Payne-Gaposchkin’s life was fascinating, but The Lightest Element struggles to justify why she deserves on-stage examination. The red scare threat wants to add jeopardy, but it’s too meandering to succeed. If you squint, you can see contemporary parallels. Debates about the limits of free speech on campus burn as pertinently as ever. But it’s not developed enough to give her story contemporary resonance.

What we are left with is a cosy celebration, full of easy triumphs and pat on the back one-liners. Boo to the sneering men who pootle in and out, only ever five words away from a misogynistic remark.

The Lightest Element plays at Hampstead Theatre until 12 October

Photography Credit: Mark Douet

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