Ben
Brantley

September 14, 2015

When Nicole Kidman steps out of the shadows, breaking off from a wall of men, and onto the edge of the stage at the Noël Coward Theater, where Anna Ziegler’s “Photograph 51” opened here on Monday night, her eyes beam undiluted willpower. It is a gaze that both chills and warms, radiating and demanding trust in this singularly self-possessed presence. Ms. Kidman makes it clear that she is in charge here, and woe unto those of us who doubt it. That act of coercion by confidence occurs in the opening seconds of Michael Grandage’s compelling production of this biographical drama about a scientific discovery and the pride and prejudice behind it. And it turns out to be a perfect introduction both to a newly reincarnated Ms. Kidman, returning to the British stage for the first time in 17 years, and to the perfectionist character she portrays. That’s Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work at King’s College in London during the early 1950s was essential to identifying the mysteries of DNA, or as another character in the play says enthusiastically, “discovering the secret of life!” In “Photograph 51,” the word on Franklin among her fellow scientists — all male, needless to say — is that she is exacting, humorless, brilliant and disciplined to the point of rigidity.