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Nicole Kidman in "Photograph 51."Credit Johan Persson

LONDON — When Nicole Kidman steps out of the shadows, breaking off from a wall of men, and onto the edge of the stage at the Noël Coward Theater, where Anna Ziegler’s “Photograph 51” opened here on Monday night, her eyes beam undiluted willpower. It is a gaze that both chills and warms, radiating and demanding trust in this singularly self-possessed presence. Ms. Kidman makes it clear that she is in charge here, and woe unto those of us who doubt it.

That act of coercion by confidence occurs in the opening seconds of Michael Grandage’s compelling production of this biographical drama about a scientific discovery and the pride and prejudice behind it. And it turns out to be a perfect introduction both to a newly reincarnated Ms. Kidman, returning to the British stage for the first time in 17 years, and to the perfectionist character she portrays.

That’s Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work at King’s College in London during the early 1950s was essential to identifying the mysteries of DNA, or as another character in the play says enthusiastically, “discovering the secret of life!” In “Photograph 51,” the word on Franklin among her fellow scientists — all male, needless to say — is that she is exacting, humorless, brilliant and disciplined to the point of rigidity.

Talking to her about work, one of them says felicitously, is “like speaking bad French to a French person who insists then on speaking to you in English just to show you you’re not good enough to speak to her in her own language, that she can walk all over you in any language, anywhere.” And though it may surprise you to hear it, Ms. Kidman has seldom been better cast than as this intimidating figure.

Snickers arose among theater vultures when it was announced that Ms. Kidman would be playing Franklin in the West End premiere of “Photograph 51,” which was first staged to admiring reviews but little fanfare Off Broadway five years ago. Ms. Kidman’s last — and only — appearance in the West End (and subsequently on Broadway) had been in David Hare’s updating of Arthur Schnitzler’s erotic roundelay “The Blue Room.”

That was the show in which she very competently portrayed an assortment of women and briefly appeared stark naked, prompting one London critic to indelibly describe her performance as “pure theatrical Viagra.” The prospect of Ms. Kidman’s now embodying a severe scientific genius conjured images of those forensic television dramas that portray, as a friend of mine puts it, “pretty people in glasses squinting through microscopes.”

But though Ms. Kidman is a beauty, her appeal has never been merely decorative. Among movie stars of her generation, she stands out for the relentless determination she projects; she seduces audiences not by charm but by concentration. And her best screen performances (as the homicidal television reporter in “To Die For,” the protective mother in “The Others,” even Virginia Woolf in “The Hours,” for which she won an Oscar) have emanated a sense of a laser-focused ambition.

“Photograph 51” allows her to capitalize on this persona to enlightening and unexpectedly poignant effect. Ms. Kidman’s Franklin is able to survive as a woman in a world of men who patronize and, on some level, fear her because she will not allow herself to buckle or fail. “Laziness?” she says. “I don’t believe in it.” And she says more than once that she is never wrong.

Ms. Ziegler’s play and Ms. Kidman’s performance point up the limitations as well as the necessity of this approach to life for a Jewish woman in a closed world of Anglo-Saxon men. (Anyone doubting the enduring relevance of the play’s feminist concerns need only recall the media firestorm set off this year by Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning British biochemist, who joked in a speech about female scientists being distractingly sexy to their male colleagues.)

Franklin’s contribution to the decoding of DNA was central; the photograph of the play’s title refers to a “eureka” image she recorded that made it possible to identify the double helix. Yet she has never been given the credit accorded to her rivals and colleagues, James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, who received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their work in the same field.

Franklin was, this play suggests, perhaps too unbending, too noncollaborative, too focused on confirming facts to allow her mind to roam fruitfully into theory-postulating conjecture. Ms. Ziegler (whose other work includes the well-received “A Delicate Ship,” which recently played Off Broadway) provides bits of Franklin’s biography, including a scientist father whose approval she could never quite win, to help explain the character’s blinkered tenacity.

Ms. Kidman grabs onto such details of character without wringing them dry. And she deftly pulls off the trick of letting Franklin reveal to us an underlying wistfulness (even before an 11 o’clock monologue that spells it out) without ever allowing us to think that the others onstage have sensed the same vulnerability.

Reciting from the correspondence she maintains with a simpatico American graduate student, Don Caspar (Patrick Kennedy), this Franklin shows shy, affecting glimmers of an awakening warmth she never displays in the workplace. Ms. Kidman’s ice-blue eyes betray the promise of a thaw here, but only just, and it’s a relief that Franklin never melts into lovelorn slush.

The other cast members are all male and uniformly good. They are, in addition to Mr. Kennedy, Will Attenborough (as Watson), Edward Bennett (as Crick), Joshua Silver (as Franklin’s research assistant) and Stephen Campbell Moore, seen on Broadway in “The History Boys,” as Wilkins, Franklin’s chief colleague and adversary. It perhaps goes without saying that at least two of these characters are a little in love with the forbidding Franklin.

Yes, the script makes its concessions to romantic conventions. And the play’s structure — in which Franklin’s fellow scientists speculate retrospectively on why events happened as they did, and whether they were inevitable — brings to mind the framework of another drama about scientific discovery, Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen.” That 1998 work is a great epistemological mystery story; “Photograph 51” doesn’t have anything like the same teasing layers or depths.

But as directed by Mr. Grandage, with a wintry set by Christopher Oram that conjures a London in ashes after World War II, “Photograph 51” sustains a crisp dramatic tension even when it skirts banality or expository tedium. And Ms. Kidman, who turns Franklin’s guardedness into as much a revelation as a concealment of character, is pretty close to perfection.

The character she plays, after all, would surely demand nothing less.