REACH FOR THE STARS: IT TAKES HARD GRAFT AND VODKA
Any week now at the Gielgud we shall hear the famous drunken cry in Juno and the Paycock “what is the stars?”. At the heart of Stella Feehily’s exhilarating play is the answer, as historically discovered by 25-year-old Cecilia Payne Gaspochkin in her PhD thesis, delivered when she had fled the ban on women taking degrees in Cambridge, UK for the slightly less patriarchal Harvard. Where they could. The young astrophysicist’s calculations massively upset the received belief, by working out that stars are made of hydrogen and helium, not solid like earth. She was told by her supervisor Henry Norris Russell to re- submit with changes, and did so, guardedly, for pragmatism’s sake. She needed to go on in research . Four years later Russell and the rest changed their minds and – with only minimal mention of her work – agreed with her theory. After similar histories of woman scientists in DNA and penicillin, it’s a tale worth telling.
But it’s not only that which makes this play a humdinger, with the redoubtable Maureen Beattie as Cecilia at its heart. It is bracing for several reasons – not least her bravura lady-academic performance, redolent of all the clever women who have stamped their way into male redoubts, been told to shut up and failed to (Nice that it comes hot on the heels of cinema’s celebration of Lee Miller in Ww2). But Feehily and director Alice Hamiltom have artfully framed it – after the lordly Russell putdown – mostly in Cecilia’s academic heyday in the 1950s, with her supporter Whipple trying to convince his Harvard colleagues that despite being both female and married, shock horror, to a Russian (it’s the cold war) , she should follow him as chair of Astronomy. It made her the first woman to achieve such a height at Harvard, after being several times passed over.
Meanwhile a student (history not science) is interviewing her for the campus paper. Annie Kingsnorth is a very demure 21-year-old (Cecilia’s assistant Rona snarks that no woman over 7 should wear a hair-ribbon). She is being courted by Budd, a dashing Korean War vet, who fixed the the interview gig for her but gradually reveals an agenda, which he’s even happy to enforce by blackmail. McCarthyite, obsessed with the red menace, he wants her artful questions to “smoke out” the Prof as a Commie.
Will she? When Cecilia necks some Polish vodka and recklessly speaks her mind about both Russell and Mc Carthy, will the girl stitch up the scientist for her political indiscretion? Or will she see she’s being played by Bud?
It’s grippingly done, twisty, all beneath a lovely diorama screen either with blackboard scribbles or glorious constellations: science and wonder together. Cecilia is tough and sweary, but Beattie catches her passion in fine moments like her thrill at novas, stars that die in an immense flare of glory. She also expresses a dry, decent humanity in dealing with the younger women, Sally and her sharp devoted assistant (Rina Mahoney, another strong presence). There is a fascinating moment when Sally is indignant that Cecilia did not stand her ground in 1925 over modifying her PhD, and the older woman explains about pragmatism: you deal with your own time. It’s a familiar example of the way every stage of feminism has challenged the generation before for compromising, taking it step by step. And there’s a gloriously comic,cruelly enraging sequence where Whipple tries to get dinosaur colleagues to see sense and appoint Cecilia to the Chair.
A double ending: the 1959 solar eclipse is beautifully evoked as the three women watch through smoked glass and the hairs rise on our necks. That would do. But in the spirit of unromantic science, we then see a moment of her emeritus prize lecture in 1977, naming female astronomers all the way to our own Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Some theatrical romantics will find that a bit anticlimactic. I think that Cecilia, as a scientist with no nonsense about her, would have preferred it that way. Good.
Hampsteadtheatre.com to 12 October
Rating. Four
PS appalling journey specially for this: awkward day, 35 minutes traffic gridlock, then train delay, no time for food, Jubilee line breakdown homeward so, missed only good train, drove home in fog, bed god knows ehen, we’re still at Colchester. I never record this sort of thing because it’s unprofessional even for little humble theatrecat.com, but wish you to know that the 90 mins was well worth the trouble, so you should go too
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