Kidman is one of a few marquee names making a splash on London stages this season.
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Kidman’s latest performance comes 17 years after she appeared in David Hare’s The Blue Room in the capital, and the Daily Telegraph’s review is as complimentary now as it was then.
The production tells the story of Rosalind Franklin – played by Nicole Kidman – whose work contributed to the understanding of DNA and its importance in the world.
The 48-year-old Oscar-winner is back treading the boards in Photograph 51, highlighting the crucial role played by scientist Rosalind Franklin in identifying the structure of DNA.
Kidman has acquired a number of the greatest critiques of her profession for the play.
If the hype surrounding the “The Blue Room” targeted on Kidman’s temporary nude second on stage, “Photograph 51“, by American playwright Anna Ziegler, is by comparability a way more sober affair, concentrating on Franklin’s skilled achievements and frosty, aggressive relationship together with her colleagues. Ben Brantley of the New York Occasions concluded that “Kidman, who turns Franklin’s guardedness into as a lot a revelation as a concealment of character, is fairly near perfection”.
“It is a fine performance in which Kidman reminds us that the scientific life can be informed by private passion”, the review continued. Her father, we learn in Ziegler’s version, had warned her that if she persisted with a scientific career, she “must never be wrong” as that would risk losing everything.
Matt Wolf, theartsdesk: “Guess what?”
Actress Nicole Kidman has been hailed by critics as “luminous” and “compelling” in her return to the London stage in the play Photograph 51. But the play is actually partly about a powerful sense of distrust – and of bad faith … “It’s my way of acknowledging him and the people in science who quietly go about their work”.
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The production returns Grandage to the playhouse where this prolific talent was last represented with a five-play sequence of shows since which time he made his first film (Genius) with none other than Kidman among the cast. Here she doesn’t strip physically … but the emotional layers are gradually exposed no less revealingly. “The result is a attractive, tender and surprising new play that elevates the West End”.
