Time and Memory Theme Analysis

The timeline of Photograph 51 is fluid: as the play tells scientist Rosalind Franklin’s story, it also emphasizes the strange and often confusing nature of time. Characters aren’t limited to linear movement through time, as they often comment on their own (and one another’s) pasts, presents, and futures. Through its unconventional structure, the play examines how time worked against Rosalind Franklin, cutting her life short and forcing her into a race against the clock to uncover the molecular structure of DNA and thus unlock “the secret of life.” But alongside this, the play proposes that memory (both personal memory and collective memories in history or literature) is just as real and important as the events that occur on a linear timeline. In doing so, Photograph 51 suggests that even though time limits and thwarts people, memory can allow them to take control of time and ensure that their own stories—and the stories of those important to them—live on. 

The constraints of time work against the characters of Photograph 51 in several different ways. Central to the play is the characters’ race to discover the structure of DNA. In addition, there’s the more existential problem of not having enough time on Earth, which emerges once Rosalind is diagnosed with ovarian cancer (a result of exposing herself to harmful X-ray beams during her research). In these ways, Rosalind Franklin’s story speaks to how time restricts, confuses, and controls humanity. “There must come a point in life when you realize you can’t begin again. That you’ve made the decisions you’ve made and then you live with them or you spend your whole life in regret,” says Rosalind to Wilkins at the end of the play. Having been diagnosed with cancer, time has felled Rosalind, and she knows it. Time has cut her life short and prevented her from completing the work she wanted to. Had she been born in a different era or given more time while she lived, history might have remembered her very differently. But time is beyond human influence or understanding—it’s an uncontrollable force that constrains people, dictating what they can and can’t do in the course of their lives.

Toward the end of the play, Rosalind is forced to contend with the cruel, unfair nature of the passage of time. “I suspect you didn’t allow yourself to see it,” Wilkins says of the fact that, while Rosalind was the first person to photograph the structure of DNA, Watson and Crick used her research to model it before she could understand the very material she’d created. “No,” Rosalind replies melancholically, “but with a little more time, I like to think I would have […] So then why didn’t I get those days? […] Didn’t I deserve them?” In this passage, Rosalind laments how time has shortchanged her. The idea that some “deserve” more time—and that she was not one of the lucky ones—devastates Rosalind. In this way, the play externalizes the grief that Rosalind must have felt toward the end of her life over having been outfoxed by her colleagues and struck down by a disease that rapidly deteriorated her body. Indeed, time itself was unfair to Rosalind Franklin.

Time was Rosalind’s enemy, cutting her life too short—but the play, as a kind of living memory, allows Rosalind to step outside of time and thus reclaim it. “It’s the tricky thing about time, and memory […] Whole worlds of things we wish had happened are as real in our heads as what actually did occur,” says Don Caspar in response to Wilkins. Wilkins doesn’t want to accept that Rosalind’s time ran out—but Caspar suggests that while time is humanity’s enemy, people can live on in the memories of those who knew them. Remembering and even reimagining a person’s life is “as real in our head as what actually did occur.” And indeed, the play itself gives Rosalind a different kind of time, if not more of it—a whole span of theatrical time devoted to her story, personal time to reflect on her successes and mistakes, and the time and attention of the very colleagues who overlooked or preyed upon her work when she lived. Thus, though time is fickle and fluid in the world of Photograph 51, the play ultimately offers its characters—and by extension, their real-life counterparts—a bittersweet way of reclaiming time.