Theatre review: Photograph 51

The last time Nicole Kidman appeared on a London stage she famously got her neeps and tatties out; the sight gave an elderly critic an erection we've had to hear about for the best part of two decades. He's retired now, so I guess Kidman felt safe to return, with her pants on this time (better safe than sorry,) to play Rosalind Franklin in Photograph 51. Anna Ziegler’s play looks at the race to discover the structure of DNA - although, in what will turn out to be a fatal flaw that consigned her to a footnote in history, Franklin never quite realises that it is a race. Soon after the War, she's working in Paris when a place at King's College becomes available. But she may have been brought there on false pretences as she's instantly taken off her work on protein: Dr Wilkins (Stephen Campbell Moore) wants her to help boost his own research into DNA, like pure theatrical Sanatogen.

Theatre review: Another Country

The past may be Another Country but I had to double-check when Julian Mitchell's play was set, as the real foreign environment in his fictionalised take on Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt is public school. It's an insular world with its own rules and language, and one that seems to exist outside of time. The play is a look at the formative years of the men who would grow up to be the country's most notorious spies for the USSR, through two fictional public schoolboys in the 1930s. Judd (Will Attenborough) is the school's resident Marxist, awake in the small hours studying theories that oppose the system he's at the heart of, and dreams of changing from within. Judd seems to be one of the few pupils in his house not to have had sex with his friend Bennett (Rob Callender,) a brazenly effeminate boy in an environment where everyone else is trying to assert their masculinity.