We round up the reviews for Stella Feehily’s drama about the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.
Broadway World: ** ” Any biographical play must overcome the challenge of wrangling dramatic intensity from real world truth. Payne-Gaposchkin’s life was fascinating, but The Lightest Element struggles to justify why she deserves on-stage examination.”
The Guardian: *** “Playwright Stella Feehily focuses the bulk of her narrative on Cecilia’s bid, decades later, to become Harvard’s chair of astronomy. Maureen Beattie’s steely portrayal presents a woman who may have learned when to hold her tongue, but who has also learned how to hold her space. She has, to use one character’s words, the “requisite iron”.”
WhatsOnStage: *** “The Lightest Element is an interesting and worthy story, its conventional storytelling and director Alice Hamilton’s fairly straightforward staging merely adds it to a list of women whom history has wronged; the execution requires a little flair in order to separate it from the many examples that have come before it.”
London Theatre.co.uk: *** “Beattie, as always, is a hugely welcome stage presence, her flintiness a commanding foil to any and all oppressors on the way to a poetic finale invoking a more immediate male figure in Payne-Gaposchkin’s own father. Even to the end, a man gets the last word.”
The Telegraph: **** “Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin isn’t a name many have heard of these days – Stella Feehily’s fascinating new play just might change that.”
The Reviews Hub: ** 1/2 “Feehily could still find an outlet for all her estimable research, even include flashbacks and forwards to other moments in Cecilia’s life, and this reordering of the material could give the the play the dramatic and theatrical motion it lacks in its present form.”
The Stage: ** “Stella Feehily’s slight, unfocused drama is about women overcoming barriers in 1950s academia.”
Time Out: *** “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.”
Theatre Vibe: “All credit to Stella Feehily for drawing attention to this unknown woman astronomer but I wanted there to be more substance to what I was watching but the story comes over as somewhat slight, and it is hard to draw meaningful conclusions.”
Theatre Cat: “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.”
The Lightest Element continues to play at the Hampstead Theatre until the 12th October.