The ‘lightest element’ in Stella Feehily’s new play is literally hydrogen, and metaphorically a real-life woman trying to forge a career in the heavily sexist world of academic astronomy in the first half of the twentieth century. The gas’s presence in the composition of stars is the groundbreaking theory of young PhD student Cecilia Payne at Harvard University in 1925. But she is dismissed by an older, male luminary of her field, who would later barely credit her when he announced the same discovery.
Flash forward. It’s 1956 and Cecilia (now Payne-Gaposchkin) is poised to become Harvard’s Chair of Astronomy and its first female department head. But the Red Scare is tearing through America and the double whammy of her being a woman who is also married to a Russian means powerful forces are out to discredit her.
The historical events at the heart of Feehily’s play are fascinating. They are another dispiriting example of pioneering female achievement in the sciences either buried or downplayed by the men in charge. Maureen Beattie gives a strong performance as Payne-Gaposchkin, who emigrated to the U.S. from the UK to advance her career in ways she was unable to under the gender restrictions of the British university system of the 1920s and would still spend her life battling ingrained prejudice. Here, she’s no-nonsense, terse and fiercely intelligent. She’s formidably tidy-minded behind her chaotic desk. She wants what she deserves and likes strong Polish vodka.
But the play around her has a case of exposition-itis. Especially in the early scenes, Feehily’s writing is dutifully methodical, laying out the facts like an encyclopaedia entry. She cultivates a nicely odd-couple relationship between Payne-Gaposchkin and her loyal yet exasperated assistant, Rona Stewart (Rina Mahoney). But the supporting characters mostly feel sketched in, not shaded. This is particularly true of anti-Commie Harvard student Norman (Steffan Cennydd), a cartoon baddie who attempts to blackmail his girlfriend and wannabe journalist, Sally Kane (Annie Kingsnorth), into digging for dirt while interviewing Payne-Gaposchkin for a student newspaper.
Things spark into life during this cat-and-mouse exchange, as Kane wrestles with her conscience while also trying to fish for information. Kingsnorth nicely conveys this shifting stance as she probes Payne-Gaposchkin about her politics. An interview is always a good set-up for taking a dive into personalities on-stage and the tussle with subterfuge in this one makes for some welcome dramatical tension. You’re left wishing that it had happened sooner or formed the main focus of the story. And as Payne-Gaposchkin discusses her career, this scene also delves into the wonder of astronomical discovery that Feehily is more inclined simply to treat as metaphor.
Director Alice Hamilton captures something of this scientific excitement in her production. On Sarah Beaton’s set, an observatory-like curved strip of video screen covers the entire back of the top of the stage, upon which video designer Zakk Hein’s animated scrawls of equations, fields of stars and solar eclipses play out like watching mid-twentieth-century news reels in a darkened cinema. There’s a sense of grandeur in these between-scene moments – of the ‘why’ and not just the struggle – that this meticulously researched play could dip into more deeply.