In 1998, one of the sensations of the season was the Broadway debut of Nicole Kidman in David Hare’s “The Blue Room,” a sexual roundelay that featured the lissome actress in a flash of nudity. When the play had its world premiere in London at the Donmar Warehouse, critic Charles Spencer wrote, “It’s pure theatrical Viagra.”Seventeen years later, the London critics are again raving about Kidman on the stage but not with the same erotic delight. Here the ecstasy is for scientific discovery, since the vehicle she has chosen is of the brainier sort: Anna Ziegler’s “Photograph 51,” a homage to Rosalind Franklin, the pioneering English chemist whose research was key to determining the double-helix structure of DNA. Had she not died of ovarian cancer in 1958, she might well have shared the 1962 Nobel Prize that went to her colleagues Maurice Wilkins, James Watson, and Francis Crick.Michael Billington in The Guardian described Kidman’s performance as “commanding and intelligent,” which captures the warm humanity of the scientist as well as her agitation with the sexism of academic life. “Her features acquire a luminous intensity as she stares at the photograph that reveals the helix patter… It is a fine performance in which Kidman reminds us that the scientific life can be informed by a private passion.” Mark Shenton, writing for The Stage, noted, “Here she doesn’t strip physically, as she famously did then [in “The Blue Room”], but the emotional layers are gradually exposed no less revealingly. The result is a beautiful, tender and surprising new play that elevates the West End.”One of the heartbreaking elements of the story is that Franklin’s x-ray work might well have triggered her fatal disease. And one of the more intriguing questions raised by Ziegler’s 90-minute drama is whether Franklin still would’ve been left out of Nobel honors had she lived. Three is the maximum number of people to whom one prize can be given. What gives the play dramatic heft is the break between Wilkins and Franklin — at one point they were no longer speaking to each other — that also reflects the condescension with which women were treated at King’s College, London in the 1950s. It is almost assured that “Photograph 51” will reach these shores as long as Kidman remains in the starring role. Just as movies like “The Theory of Everything” and “The Imitation Game” have proved solid at the box-office, Broadway dramas centered on math and science, such as “Copenhagen,” “Proof,” and “Constellations,” have all managed to recoup — albeit the latter boasted the marquee names of Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson.“Photograph 51,” directed by Michael Grandage, continues at the Noel Coward Theatre through November 21.
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