by Anna Ziegler
seen at the Noel Coward Theatre on 26 October 2015
Directed by Michael Grandage and designed by Christopher Oram, the play features Nicole Kidman as Rosalind Franklin, Stephen Campbell Moore as Maurice Wilkins, Edward Bennett as Francis Crick, Will Attenborough as James Watson, Joshua Silver as Ray Gosling and Patrick Kennedy as Don Caspar.
Set in the underground laboratories of Kings College London (on the Strand) in 1951-2, the play concerns the research of Dr Rosalind Franklin who was attempting to photograph DNA in order to determine its structure. Her approach was not to speculate, but to deduce from reliable observation. At the same time, in Cambridge, Crick and the American Watson were approaching the same problem by building models based on what they knew, hoping that intuition would help.
