The Lightest Element at Hampstead Theatre – review

Unfortunately, the story of a man stealing a woman’s work is not uncommon; the story of a man standing in a woman’s way all the more so. So, while the trials of Celia Payne-Gaposchkin are certainly saddening, they are not especially surprising.

We begin in 1976 when Professor Payne-Gaposchkin is awarded the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship for her lifetime achievement, an award ironically named after the man who took credit for her greatest discovery.

Now in the autumn of her career, Professor Payne-Gaposchkin (Mrs G to her colleagues) meditates on its inception, taking us back to 1925, the year of her PhD publication, and then to 1956, the year she would finally be appointed chair of Harvard’s department of Astronomy.

Maureen Beattie has all the gravitas and poise required for a groundbreaking astronomer and all the wry humour that would no doubt comfort someone repeatedly having to make do with less than she deserves. She doesn’t quite pull off the wide-eyed 25-year-old iteration, and when Professor Henry Norris Russell (Julian Wadham) intends to intimidate her into changing her thesis, it looks more as though he is afraid of her than the other way around. Thankfully, this only accounts for one scene.

Rina Mahoney, playing the professor’s brilliant assistant, though well cast, gets slightly bogged down in the American accent and struggles to deliver with the quickfire ease her character requires.

Sarah Beaton’s design of a planetarium-like screen curving around the stage creates a beautiful expanse when the screen shows the glittering night sky. But because much of the play takes place in poky academic offices and cafes, the effect isn’t really fitting, and multiple attempts to create more intimate spaces are in vain. There’s also some very strange blocking: In a preliminary interview between Mrs G and a young student, Sally Kane (Annie Kingsnorth), for example, everyone stands throughout, despite there being two perfectly good chairs in Mrs G’s office; it’s as though they haven’t had any prop rehearsals.

In the last decade or so, many contributions made by women and credited to men throughout history have come to artistic light: Colette, Margaret Keane, Ada Lovelace, NASA’s “hidden figures” to name a few. Particularly because Stella Fehily’s script begins at the end, we already know where this is going, and while The Lightest Element is an interesting and worthy story, its conventional storytelling and director Alice Hamilton’s fairly straightforward staging merely adds it to a list of women whom history has wronged; the execution requires a little flair in order to separate it from the many examples that have come before it.