The Lightest Element

If you really want to know how a new appointment was made in academia, go and see “The Lightest Element”. Cecilia Payne, born in 1900 in Wendover, went on to become the first female professor at Harvard and then first female chair of a department in 1956, truly one of the many inspiring female scientists you may never have heard of. “The Lightest Element” is showing at The Hampstead Theatre, https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/ until 12 October. Stella Feehily’s play illuminates how some fellow academics and others tried any devious method to prevent these appointments. Along the way the audience is treated to just sufficient fascinating astronomy and beautiful video illustrations to help understand the ground-breaking science at the heart of Cecilia’s work. It was a great relief that the play concentrated on her life’s work as a determined scientist while her family life was only ever mentioned in passing.

Playwright Stella Feehily first heard Cecilia’s story in 2016 and was determined to write it. She is well qualified as she has a great backlog of successful plays dealing with “issues”. Watching an astronomer doing her calculations doesn’t lead easily to dramatic moments so Stella looked for more controversial aspects of her life. The most dramatic happened in 1956 with her appointments made in the face of sex discrimination and also political smear. Stella used her creativity to invent two young characters who explored the latter while they also explored potential historical “defects” in each other. All at the time when the Rock ‘n Roll revolution was happening, too!

Director Alice Hamilton and Video Designer Zaak Hein kept up a pace fast and the rhythm was not interrupted by an interval. Much use was made of the revolve on stage to move rapidly between scenes and the cyclorama on which were projected words, equations, quotations and the stars. Cast members were involved in slick furniture moving but never the star of the show, Maureen Beattie as Cecilia herself, because she was always busy preparing for the next development. Fortunately, the characterisation required that Cecilia did not need changes of clothes! By the end of the piece, it was clear that the women shown were a great support to her as were some of her male colleagues. In an ensemble work it is inevitable that some actors “double up” and despite a short 4 week rehearsal time, it was clear that the team had gelled beautifully.

Cecilia dedicated her life to Astronomy at the age of 20 in Cambridge, England. In 1925 her PhD was submitted, using the equations of an Indian physicist M N Saha. Yet Professor Henry Norris Russell of Princeton persuaded her to question the novel conclusion suggested by the evidence. That didn’t stop him from using facts he claimed to have discovered himself in a paper he published a few years later and he was initially given credit for proclaiming that the stars are overwhelmingly made of Hydrogen and Helium. By 1960, Otto Struve declared her work to be “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy”. In 1976, the American Astronomical Society awarded her the prestigious Henry Norris Russell Prize. In her acceptance lecture, she said, “The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something.” The findings of her PhD were obliquely referenced in the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 but she had already died in 1979.

In 1956, Mrs G, an abbreviation of her married name, Gaposchin, was finally made a Professor having been overtaken by male colleagues many times in the intervening decades. When it became clear that she was the leading contender for Chair of the department her chauvinist opponents looked for yet another way to block her appointment and alighted upon the McCarthy investigation into the possibility that she and her (Ukrainian born) husband were communists even though they had been cleared of all charges.

To find the Hampstead Theatre, catch the train from Wendover to Marylebone, change at Amersham onto the Metropolitan line for Finchley Road then onto the Jubilee line to Swiss Cottage. Alternatively, train all the way to Marylebone then walk to Baker Street and catch the 13 or 113 and descend at Swiss Cottage underground station. The Theatre can be seen from Finchley Road. On the return journey walk down to Finchley Road and turn right to the nearest bus stop for number 13 or 113 to return you to Baker Street then walk up Melcombe Street back to Marylebone Station.

See also https://wendovernews.co.uk/news/cecilia-payne/

Jane Larkham