The Lightest Element – Hampstead Theatre, London

Writer: Stella Feehily

Director: Alice Hamilton

It begins with one of the most significant scientific discoveries of all time, one that fundamentally altered our perceptions of the universe, and it ends despairing of the limitations of the scientific life with a list of equally overlooked contributors to astrophysics. Stella Feehily’s new play, The Lightest Element for Hampstead Theatre, is about those ignored female physicists and the career of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in particular, whose PhD discovery was dismissed and later claimed by a man. A blocky play that struggles to separate facts from the delivery of character development, this fascinating woman’s story gets bogged down in rescuing Payne-Gaposchkin from obscurity rather than showing us the force that she was.

Dismissed as a radical in 1925 when presenting her thesis about hydrogen and helium’s presence in the stars, the meat of The Lightest Element takes place in 1956 when Payne-Gaposchkin is at last in line for a Harvard Chair and a young reporter from the student newspaper is tasked with interviewing her. But there are multiple agendas in play and while the all-male Faculty want to keep her out of power, an informer for the FBI linked to the paper is determined to prove she has Communist sympathies.

If you read the programme essays ahead of the performance, then much of what follows in this 95-minute play is a tick list of key biographical information contained there about Payne-Gaposchkin’s academic achievements, the refusal of the male-dominated field to believe her early stars theory, of her ongoing resentment towards former supervisor Henry Norris Russell and the segregation she endured based on gender alone. Feehily has taken much of the dialogue directly from these writings, but few of the interactions feel like a real conversation between human beings.

Feehily admirably wants to give Payne-Gaposchkin this platform and, while we feel the eminence of her name, we lose Cecilia entirely and there is no attempt to get beneath the surface of her as a character, what drove her and how she forged a career at all with so many obstacles being invented to deter her. Cecilia was undoubtedly a great woman, but The Lightest Element lacks the flesh and blood humanity of the person beneath all this research and the rest of the real or invented characters fare no better. Sarah Beaton’s rather basic and bare staging design doesn’t help, while the wrap-around screen is hardly used, creating too much void space.

The best scene in the play is a clue to how material might be re-ordered, taking place in Cecilia’s (Maureen Beattie) office when a young female student (Annie Kingsnorth) arrives to interview her. Here, Feehily allows her character to let loose on her political and other views, but there is also an inbuilt drama as reporter Sally tries to discover the extent of her Communist appetites. The entire play could really be built around a much longer version of this scene, a cat-and-mouse dynamic in which reputations, honesty and loyalties shift and evolve on both sides, seeing Sally use her presumed naivety to lay traps (as she is beginning to in the existing conversation) while the more experienced woman skilfully dodges them and also inspires a spark in the younger. This would be a much stronger basis for this otherwise ordinary biography.

Feehily could still find an outlet for all her estimable research, even include flashbacks and forwards to other moments in Cecilia’s life, and this reordering of the material could give the the play the dramatic and theatrical motion it lacks in its present form.

Runs until12 October 2024