Review Roundup: PHOTOGRAPH 51, Starring Nicole Kidman, Opens in London

The Michael Grandage Company presents the UK premiere of Anna Ziegler's PHOTOGRAPH 51, opening tonight 14 September at the Noel Coward Theatre and running until 21 November.

Nicole Kidman, who leads the company as Rosalind Franklin, is joined by Will Attenborough (James Watson), Edward Bennett (Francis Crick), Stephen Campbell Moore (Maurice Wilkins), Patrick Kennedy (Don Caspar) and Joshua Silver (Ray Gosling).

"The instant I saw the photograph my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race." Does Rosalind Franklin know how precious her photograph is? In the race to unlock the secret of life it could be the one to hold the key. With rival scientists looking everywhere for the answer, who will be first to see it and more importantly, understand it? Anna Ziegler's extraordinary play looks at the woman who cracked DNA and asks what is sacrificed in the pursuit of science, love and a place in history.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: Ms. Kidman has seldom been better cast than as this intimidating figure...Ms. Kidman's Franklin is able to survive as a woman in a world of men who patronize and, on some level, fear her because she will not allow herself to buckle or fail...Ms. Ziegler's play and Ms. Kidman's performance point up the limitations as well as the necessity of this approach to life for a Jewish woman in a closed world of Anglo-Saxon men...Ms. Kidman grabs onto such details of character without wringing them dry. And she deftly pulls off the trick of letting Franklin reveal to us an underlying wistfulness...without ever allowing us to think that the others onstage have sensed the same vulnerability...The other cast members are all male and uniformly good...as directed by Mr. Grandage..."Photograph 51" sustains a crisp dramatic tension even when it skirts banality or expository tedium. And Ms. Kidman, who turns Franklin's guardedness into as much a revelation as a concealment of character, is pretty close to perfection.

Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter: ...Photograph 51 feels oddly staid and conventional, perhaps because Ziegler's play is essentially a middling blend of straight bio-drama and high-school science lesson...Fortunately, Kidman delivers...her performance is muted but reliably intense, hinting at wounded depths beneath Franklin's implacably chilly exterior...But there are no emotional fireworks, no grandstanding epiphanies, no Viagra moments here...The tone initially feels like a creaky English drawing-room comedy from the 1960s, overly reliant on stuffed-shirt caricatures and labored banter, sprinkled with casual sexism and anti-Semitism. The lines get faster, smarter and more poetic in the final half hour, but never quite shake off the sense of a musty provincial theater piece. Grandage's production is a worthy effort, but a little passionless, inherently limited in dramatic force by its subject matter.

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: ...in taking us to the heart of her story, which itself sits at the centre of one of the most significant discoveries of all time - the structure of DNA - Kidman displays once again the power to hold us in thrall. Although her kit is Fifties demure, the caboodle of her nuanced performance is the stuff of intoxication...Were the play (first staged in New York) simply to assert that Franklin was robbed of the prestige that was rightly hers...it would serve a valid but rather worthy purpose. It's much more fascinating than that, though. It deals with timely feminist issues but also the key fundamentals of how we relate to each other, who we are, our tragic flaws...By turns icily impatient and glowering, but thawing too for telling moments, Kidman brilliantly suggests an intelligent woman compacted of porcelain and steel...Although the supporting male performances suffer from scantily written roles, Grandage directs it all with characteristically fluid aplomb...

Michael Billington, The Guardian: It's a commanding, intelligent performance and my only complaint about Anna Ziegler's intriguing, informative 95-minute play is that it is not longer. Like Ziegler, Kidman avoids presenting Franklin as a stereotyped bluestocking...It is a fascinating story and Kidman's performance captures the complexities in Franklin's character. Kidman bridles at the routine sexism of academic life, rejects Wilkins's cack-handed attempts to win her over and looks nervously away when a sympathetic American colleague invites her to dinner. But Kidman also conveys the ecstasy of scientific discovery: her features acquire a luminous intensity as she stares at the photograph that reveals the helix pattern. Even when confronted by the news of her twin tumours, Kidman determinedly propels herself back to the laboratory. It is a fine performance in which Kidman reminds us that the scientific life can be informed by private passion.

Paul Taylor, The Independent: Ziegler's thoughtful, empathetic play brings home with bitter comedy the unlovely male-domination of this world in the 1950s, but it declines to patronise the Jewish Franklin by presenting her as an example of pure victimhood...All the characters, apart from the heroine, are men; they recount and re-enact the story...In her compelling and subtle performance, Kidman beautifully captures the prickly defensiveness, the lonely dedication, and the suppressed emotional longings of the scientist...The actress nails to a nicety Franklin's high-handed brusqueness...Michael Grandage's superb 95-minute production expertly balances its energies as detective thriller and as interactive speculation about the hovering moments where her life could have taken a different turning. When she's diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the bitter-sweet might-have-beens never become cloying. Franklin's regret is not that she failed to get there first but that she didn't discern the double-helix in the photograph. As delivered with a wonderfully unsentimental candour by Kidman, that confession seems to liberate us from the comparative pettiness of ego-driven pursuits of the truth. Glorious.

Mark Shenton, The Stage: It's a dense subject for a play, and I can't say that I honestly understood all the science presented. As with life itself, you have to take a lot of it on trust. But the play is actually partly about a powerful sense of distrust - and of bad faith - as the male scientists claim as their own the big discovery of X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, whose photography - and in particular, Photograph 51 - revealed the helical structure of DNA, and built their own models out of it...So, in an intricately layered series of revelations, it becomes several plays all at once: a thriller about a race of discovery; an exposé about sexism in science...and a treatise about loneliness, as these scientists studiously avoid relationships that might interfere with their work...Here [Kidman] doesn't strip physically, as she famously did then, 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.

Theo Bosanquet, WhatsOnStage: Dressed almost permanently in a lab coat and often glued to her microscope, [Nicole Kidman] succeeds at capturing the icy intelligence of a woman whose stubborn refusal to hypothesise in place of hard fact (the play alleges) meant that she wound up losing the race. As we've seen before, Kidman does buttoned-up with aplomb, and though Ziegler underdraws large aspects of Franklin's life, we certainly get enough of a sense of her work, which was driven by an almost monomaniacal commitment to detail. But this is very much an ensemble effort, including Stephen Campbell Moore as Franklin's professionally and sexually frustrated King's College colleague Maurice Wilkins, and Will Attenborough and Edward Bennett making an entertaining double act as the thrusting Watson and Crick...Grandage directs all with his trademark precision as scenes flow from one to the next with barely a join in sight.

Stephen Collins, BritishTheatre.com: Kidman speaks in a peculiar monotone for much of the performance. There are passages in the text which should be luminous, lyrical moments of intense beauty, where Kidman's character reveals a little of what drives her relentlessly forward. But they fall flat, rendered dreary and dull by Kidman's inability to use her voice in ways which are revealing or characterful. Her face seems incapable of movement: a solid block of expressionless beauty...Her hands and arms overcompensate for the lack of facial manoeuvring; they seem to be in a performance all of their own, flapping and flailing, curiously planted on a hip or clasped behind her head, awkwardly and oddly. To give Kidman her due, she has undeniable presence on stage, but she is incapable of harnessing that presence into her performance or using it to make her scientist character mesmerising or scintillating...For the play to work, Kidman's character needs to be inspirational, complicated, difficult, extraordinary; coming across as a mediocre functionary is simply not enough.

Sam Marlowe, Chicago Tribune: It's 17 years since the London stage last saw Nicole Kidman, when she starred in "The Blue Room," David Hare's adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's play, and many were as eager to cop a salacious eyeful of her briefly nude body as they were to praise her acting. Now she's back, in a 2008 play by U.S. writer Anna Ziegler in which eroticism is heavily clothed in intellect, and passions are permitted their expression only in the thrill of scientific discovery. And, in a performance of contained energy, rigorous intelligence and sharply focused intensity, she proves herself a serious theatrical talent...It's a great story, with thriller-like twists and tension, but in truth, Ziegler's is not a great play. Skipping backwards and forwards through time and blending scenes with confessional monologue and debate, it's rather like a tribunal in some nameless netherworld: a reckoning, in which opposing points of view are presented for history's judgment...the characters surrounding Kidman's Rosalind Franklin are somewhat thinly drawn, and the reliance on exposition-heavy, direct-address speeches is dramatically rather unexciting.

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

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