Photograph 51: how do you bring science to the stage?

Anna Ziegler's new play, starring Nicole Kidman as scientist Rosalind Franklin, is a sophisticated and rewarding treatment of the impact of the human frailties on the process of scientific discovery

Here is a hard problem: how to write a play about science that captures the real complexities of research while remaining accessible - and dramatic? I'm not sure that scientists like myself are best placed to investigate because such plays are not written for the likes of us. Being too deeply immersed in the world of the laboratory, we know too much and cannot see ourselves with an outsider's eye.

This defect of perspective is a recurring theme in Anna Ziegler's Photograph 51, which tells the story of the scientists involved in revealing the structure of DNA.