Writer and Director: Ross McGregor
In a pair of plays (currently running in rep until 19th February at the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre,) playwright Ross McGregor explores the lives and achievements of, first, Gustav Holst, composer of The Planets, and second, in Payne: the Stars Are Fire, the pioneering work of Cecelia Payne. Cecelia Payne was a student at Cambridge in 1919, but Cambridge didn’t give degrees to women until 1948, so she was forced to take a position at the Harvard College Observatory. Obviously, women couldn’t be trusted to actually use the Observatory’s telescope, so she was employed as a Computer, scanning thousands and thousands of photographs of stars to determine, well, everything.
It’s a rich, revealing story, told with great clarity and feeling by McGregor, who also directs. Cecelia Payne is played by Laurel Marks. She manages to indicate the anger and frustration, and also the brilliance and ambition, of Payne without cracking the façade of English upper-class reserve. She is magnificently supported by Cornelia Baumann, playing pioneering astronomer Annie Jump Cannon as a clone of Katharine Hepburn; acid, acerbic, but brave and selfless in the cause of her younger colleagues, and the rights of women to equal pay and acknowledgement, when required. The other central performance is Lucy Ioannou as Adelaide Ames. She plays her as a live-wire bubbly flapper, always just about to Charleston round the austere office set. With so much repression and understated angst around her, Ioannou almost single-handedly brings joy and energy to the stage, and it’s a performance to treasure, and it allows her fellow actors to develop their character’s actual life-stories with the appropriate grimness and intensity, and she also keeps us aware that Adelaide Ames was a considerable scientist in her own right.
The men in the cast are very properly subordinated to the formidable trio of women, but Alex Stevens, as Observatory director Harlow Shapley, brings bounce and vigour onto the stage. Toby Wynn-Davis doubles, as both the entirely admirable Gustav Holst, and also, with a magnificent moustache, the reptilian and lecherous Harvard professor Henry Russell, in a pair of admirable cameos. The cast is completed by Edward Spence as Donald Menzel, the only man in an office of formidable women, credited by a viciously sexist establishment with many of their achievements. It’s a pretty thankless role, and Mr. Spence deserves a great deal of credit for making his character sympathetic. Hapless, but sympathetic. The same cast play all the parts in the companion piece Holst: the Music In the Spheres.
The set, the austere office of the Harvard Observatory, is well-realised, with a gauze back wall used to striking effect to project an array of scenes, from office wall to galaxies, and to allow some of the fantasy sequences and musical numbers (there are fantasy sequences and musical numbers, it isn’t a solemn show by any means) a striking presence. Odin Corie’s set, Jonathan Simpson’s light design, the sound design of Kristina Kaplin, all set up the videography of Douglas Baker, which is stellar in all senses of the word.
The play treats hard science, and terrible social injustice, with due respect and great intelligence. It also makes for two and a half hours of top class theatre, both entertaining and informative. Highly recommended.
Runs until 19 February 2022
