The big chill

Michael Grandage’s latest show is about an old snap. Geneticists regard the X-ray of the hydrated ‘B’ form of DNA as one of the loveliest images ever captured. To laymen it looks like some woodlice drowning in yesterday’s porridge. The pic was taken in 1951 by the British biochemist Dr Rosalind Franklin but she failed to realise its significance. When James Watson passed through her lab he took one glimpse and instantly twigged that it revealed the helical structure of DNA. With his pal Francis Crick he built the famous double-helix model which bagged them the Nobel Prize. Dr Franklin (played by Nicole Kidman) won nothing.

We know all this in advance, of course, so the play lacks any suspense. The only uncertainly surrounds the manner and scale of Dr Franklin’s defeat. A real drama needs juicier ingredients than these. Rosalind Franklin is an exceptionally icy customer, a lonely, buttoned-up little brainbox who hasn’t a friend, a lover, or even a pet dormouse to brighten her life. The cheeriest account of her personality comes from a colleague. ‘She’s unspeakably difficult.’ At times, so is the show. Striding boffins march in and out spouting jargon. ‘There’s not a chance I’ll go back to haemoglobin diffraction patterns.’ It’s hard to imagine what induced Ms Kidman to ascend this pitiless glacier. Her eerily symmetrical face is absorbing to look at but for a limited time. It’s not an ideal conduit for the staple material of theatre, namely suffering: suffering endured, suffering overcome. Dr Franklin’s emotional life is locked away behind Ms Kidman’s blank, steely gaze. Her millions of fans who regard her as a sex goddess will be dismayed to see her slender figure sheathed in a nunnish pinny throughout. And her lovely cascades of blonde hair have been dyed beige and pinned against her skull like a dead beehive.