It was Henry Cavendish (no relation) who, around 1766, discovered the lightest element – what he called “flammable air”, later dubbed hydrogen; the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge was later established in his honour. After watching Stella Feehily’s admirable new play at Hampstead, you’re left feeling that the Buckinghamshire-born astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) deserves grand institutional commemoration too. After all, it was she who, in 1925, ground-breakingly and correctly proposed that stars were primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, pitting herself against the received wisdom of the day.
“She was the first to discover the origins of matter, the building blocks of the universe,” as her Harvard research assistant Rona Stewart (Rina Mahoney) puts it here. Addressing the American Astronomical Society in 1977 – a lecture that bookends the evening – Payne-Gaposchkin was wryly conscious of the limits of recognition in science: “Fame is the reward of the few.”
Whether the lack of common appreciation for this remarkable woman is down to still-unextinguished sexism and/or the “foreignness” her surname (she married the Russian-born astrophysicist Sergei Gaposchkin in 1934), Feehily leaves you in no doubt that in her time Cecilia was subject to hideous chauvinism plus the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s.
Early on, at Harvard, we see Maureen Beattie’s quietly blazing and angular heroine encounter – with tight-lipped politeness – the defensive condescension of a professor (Julian Wadham) so flabbergasted by her 1925 doctoral thesis that he won’t approve it until she corrects it: “You will be thought simply mad or arrogant if you pursue a theory that rejects the findings of the great scientific minds”.
The scene tellingly jumps to the mid-50s, by which time Cecilia has been made Harvard’s first woman professor. But she’s by now in the sights of a younger generation of men, as embodied by the editor of Harvard’s student newspaper who – looking for something “juicy” to scupper her appointment as Chair of Astronomy – encourages, then coerces, an aspiring journalist, Sally, to interview Cecilia and coax out possibly self-damning political comments.
One element of the ensuing drama is whether this get-ahead student (a fittingly bright-eyed Annie Kingsnorth) will align with or conspire to hobble the trail-blazer. It’s not exactly edge-of-your-seat stuff (the opening scene confirms that Payne-Gaposchkin prevailed), but Feehily captures well the way that while looking at the stars, earthbound envies and career-battles can prevail. It’s a succinct, pithily informative affair; played with brisk, light intelligence, and moving back and forth in time, it avoids the aridity of a lecture even as it unfashionably resolves to give us an academic portrait of the lady.
Glinting-eyed, Beattie is in her element, the character always two steps ahead, and Alice Hamilton’s production combines clinical efficiency with projection-assisted wonder: stars gleam in the firmament, an eclipse takes place and our grasp of the universe expands as a determined woman pushes at the horizons.
Until Oct 12; hampsteadtheatre.com
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