The struggle to break free of restrictions – and the practical need for compromise – is something we can all appreciate. It’s there in Stella Feehily’s new play The Lightest Element, directed at Hampstead by Alice Hamilton – the story of astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (Maureen Beattie, exuding brittle charisma), who was the first person to realise that stars are predominantly made up of hydrogen and helium, and not iron.
Of course, her monumental breakthrough, made in 1925 at the age of 25, soon after her arrival at Harvard, was rubbished by her older, male supervisors (it contradicted the prevailing view), and when one, Henry Norris Russell (Julian Wadham), realised four years later that she was right, and published a paper on the subject, he was widely credited with the discovery. Men, eh? When we see this interaction, early on in the drama, he expects her to serve him tea while he crushes her thesis.
The Lightest Element is set mostly in 1956, the year that Payne-Gaposchkin finally received a full professorship, and the central conceit of this absorbing hour and a half is that a student, Sally Kane (Annie Kingsnorth), is writing a profile of “Mrs G”, as her faithful assistant Rona (Rina Mahoney) calls her – a nicely drawn relationship – for Harvard’s student newspaper.
Sally’s ghastly editor boyfriend, Norman (given an edgy dubiousness by Steffan Cennydd), is a vehement anti-communist; he wants her to unearth what he believes is the professor’s (whose husband is Russian) pinko tendencies, ultimately to prevent her becoming chair of the department, a decision that is imminent.
As the interview gets under way, the play shakes off its early, expositional sluggishness. Watching the two women dance around each other – Kane gamely probing while struggling with her conscience and her growing admiration for her subject; Payne-Gaposchkin enjoying herself until she begins to suspect an underlying agenda – is riveting.
Feehily elegantly draws the casually sexist landscape that these women are navigating; a later scene, among the men debating Payne-Gaposchkin’s appointment as chair, is amusing and interestingly pitched as a moment of change. It’s fascinating, and enraging, and if it never fully ignites, it has a lasting slow burn.
The Real Ones, at the Bush theatre, is more of a hurtle. Following two best mates, Zaid (Nathaniel Curtis) and Neelam (Mariam Haque), over 18 years from the age of 19, Waleed Akhtar’s new two-hour play leaps from scene to scene but never quite sits with anything long enough.
Growing up as working-class British Pakistani Muslims in Ilford, east London, both have struggled with a lack of freedom; Neelam chafing against the behavioural expectations foisted upon girls, Zaid secretly being gay. We meet them, in Anthony Simpson-Pike’s production, as he comes out to her (she is unsurprised) in the first year of university. He has left home to do computer science instead of drama under familial pressure; she has been forced to live with her watchful parents while completing her studies.
They want to be playwrights, and the biggest taboo is being “basic”. And they “love the bones” of each other, as we’re told in a repeated, drug-spangled clubbing flashback, though whether what you think you feel really counts when your brain is being artificially flooded with serotonin is an interesting question.
Life comes at them, of course. Neelam won’t compromise her writing to make it more accessible to white audiences, so swerves into law; she falls in love with a non-Muslim black man, to her family’s horror.
Zaid plugs away writing, working low-paid jobs and embarking on a relationship with an older, middle-class white playwright and teacher, Jeremy (Anthony Howell – both he and Nnabiko Ejimofor, as Neelam’s Nigerian British partner Deji, do pretty well in sketchy supporting roles). Disappointments visit them both, tragedies befall them, concessions are made.
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Neelam’s development, from sweary, swaggering teenager to thoughtful, loving but careworn adult, is convincing, and Akhtar embraces genuinely fascinating ideas, of which the complexity of friendship is only one. Racism between different communities of colour, explored in the relationship between Neelam and Deji; what it means to be gay and Muslim; the endless cycle of negotiation and failure that is parenthood. But with so much packed in, these moments are frustratingly fleeting.
And for me, Zaid poses a problem. His growth is more subtle, to the point that it seems arrested, and his increasing self-obsession and inability to muster compassion for the failings of the people who care for him is startlingly unsympathetic.
Most unpleasantly, his disappointment that Neelam hasn’t achieved the great things he believes her capable of seems to diminish her inherent value. Her bewilderment at his behaviour feels entirely reasonable. She’d be better off without him.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Lightest Element ★★★
The Real Ones ★★
Nancy Durrant writes The London Culture Edit on Substack