Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Katherine Godfrey
An Extraordinary Light is amongst one of the rare moments in theatre, an excellently written monologue for a female performer by a male writer and one which smacks completely of teaching an audience something that they possibly didn’t know was important to understand. For without An Extraordinary Light, what people might know about one of the most important discoveries in the history of humanity, the construction of the D.N.A. Double Helix, could be clouded by the thoughts of those who shouted loudest.
Katherine Godfrey performs as the near forgotten British scientist Rosalind Franklin in Rob Johnston’s play and single-handedly showed the audience at the Unity Theatre exactly why the saying winners write the history books is not always the whole story and those who contribute along the way sometimes get overlooked and sometimes even disregarded to the point where what should be a momentous achievement for humanity is a cause for regret.
For anybody with an interest in science the names Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins are amongst the foremost and easily remembered names of 20th Century genetics but the woman who diligently and at great personal cost to her health paved the way with them by X-raying the diffraction of the cell and specifying of how much water should be found in the molecule, data that gave the chance for the three men to be jointly given the Nobel Prize but not Ms. Franklin who died a couple of years earlier from ovarian cancer.
To capture this anguish, the wry smile as the actor ruefully understands that men were able to play the race, the sprinting game better than she as she was far to diligent in her checking and cross checking to ever get there first, took extraordinary commitment to the part and in a set that consisted of the barest of props, tellingly the expensive microscope took centre stage on the table, it was the words that remained unsaid that filled the air. The injustice that never has been quite righted and the stain of scientific inequality that takes a lot to understand but can still fill the heart with anger.
When theatre teaches you something that has remained in the dark, something so well hidden that it causes you to reach for books then that surely is the finest accolade a play can be labelled with. For Katherine Godfrey and Rob Johnston they may well have started off a new wave of interest in the science and in Rosalind Franklin.
To read more on Rosalind Franklin, get hold of the biography by Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA.
Ian D. Hall