History is a strange animal. Far from being ‘Just one thing after another’ (as observed by Alan Bennett in The History Boys) it is frequently a complex amalgam of facts and interpretation, and differing accounts of history often attribute credit and blame according to whim.
Alan Turing’s key role in breaking the Enigma Code and helping to shorten World War II is pretty much without dispute, as is his part in the development of the computer, although dispute still rages over how much of a team effort both of these achievements were, and how many unsung heroes and heroines there were working alongside him.
Fortunately, though, Hugh Whitemore’s play Breaking the Code is not about any of this at all. Whilst much of the narrative is set against the backdrop of his work at Bletchley Park, the play is about the way Alan Turing quite decidedly broke a few other codes along the way, and these had nothing to do with mathematics or computers.
Whilst other stories have sought to tell of work he did, Whitemore set out in this play to explore Turing’s personal life, and the way in which his unerring sense of logic led him to walk into a police station in 1952 and candidly admit to his homosexuality while reporting a minor burglary. Unsurprisingly for the time, the police became much more interested in his startling disclosure than the crime he had come to report, and the subsequent trial, conviction and punishment have become notorious.
Breaking the Code is the story of a man who, having helped to unravel the mysteries of intelligence and machine learning, broke one code too many, not only in committing what has long since ceased to be a crime (something he probably foresaw) but in committing the cardinal sin of admitting it.
Inspired by Andrew Hodges’ book ‘Alan Turing, The Enigma’ Whitemore’s play begins in the police station in 1952, as he sits down to report the theft of a few trivial items from his house. It then takes us back in time to scenes at his parent’s home in the 1920s, where we meet Christopher Morcom, widely believed to be the first and possibly last great love of Turing’s life (albeit probably unrequited) who he had met at boarding school. We then follow him to Bletchley Park and meet, among others, Pat Green, one of a number of fictionalized characters in the play, who is loosely based on Joan Clarke, the fellow cryptanalyst to whom Turing was briefly engaged. It is to Pat who Turing later explains the alarming effects of the chemical castration he underwent as an alternative to imprisonment.
There are very fine performances here from Peter Hamilton Dyer as Dillwyn Knox, the man who hires Turing at Bletchley, from Carla Harrison Hodge as Pat, and from Susie Trayling as Turing’s mother Sara. Joseph Edwards gives an affecting reading of Christopher Morcom, sadly a short-lived character, who dies tragically at the age of 18, but in this reading of the play he does make a return, of which more will be said later.
Joe Usher successfully multi-roles as both Ron Miller, a fictional representation of the brief affair who led to Turing’s downfall, and as Nikos, with whom Turing is found in later life enjoying the simplicity of a holiday romance unhindered by language. Niall Costigan completes the fine cast with his splendidly incredulous Detective Sergeant Mick Ross.
The role of Turing was to a large extent written expressly for Derek Jacobi, who played him in the 1986 Guildford premiere and in his West End debut in the transfer to the Theatre Royal Haymarket. There is not a single line of the published text in which Turing’s part is written with a stammer, although it is obliquely referenced by a couple of other characters in the play. The author clearly intended that Jacobi would employ the technique he had demonstrated a decade earlier in TV’s ‘I Claudius’ and indeed he did, imbuing the part with a very significant stammer.
Whilst other performers in recent years have played the part with greater vocal subtlety, Mark Edel-Hunt, playing Turing in this production, goes full-throttle Jacobi. He does take care to observe that those who speak with a stammer often lose it when in full verbal flow on a subject they’re passionate about. He therefore drops it almost completely during the impressively delivered three-page speech that opens act II, but at times he has a tendency to overdo it slightly. Despite this, he gives a well rounded account of the part and carries the audience with him through the triumphs and pitfalls of the man’s life.
Jonathan Fensom has provided a handsome set of towering walls and dusty shelves which, with the aid of subtle lighting from Johanna Town, succeeds in transforming itself from country pile to Manchester pub and from public school to a sultry room in Greece.
The jury of history remains undecided whether Turing’s death from cyanide poisoning was intentional or a careless accident, but Whitemore chooses to write an early scene in which he talks of his fondness for the Snow White story, complete with its poisoned apple. Nonetheless, in the original closing scenes, Sara Turing, upon collecting Alan’s effects from DS Ross, insists that the suicide verdict is a mistake, and that her son would never have taken his own life.
Changes in the law came far too late for Alan Turing to be pardoned during his lifetime. This is actually the first time Whitemore’s play has been revived professionally since the posthumous pardon granted him in 2013 was extended to pardon all others formerly convicted under the same defunct indecency laws. The very ‘code’ which Turing broke has itself been broken.
To mark this fact, director Jesse Jones includes a brief epilogue to the play which, as Whitemore himself is also dead, has been written by Neil Bartlett. Alan Turing, in letters to Christopher Morcom’s mother, expressed the firm belief in the immortality of the soul. It is therefore poignant and fitting that Morcom is, in a sense, reincarnated as a sixth-form student addressing his school, played by the same actor, Edwards. It is a brief addition, but serves to remind us, as if we needed any reminder, not only of the progress we have made but how much further there is to go.
This co-production by Royal and Derngate, Landmark Theatres and Oxford Playhouse, in association with Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse and HOME Manchester opened in Northampton in September, and this week’s performances at Liverpool Playhouse are part of a five venue tour that ends in Manchester on 1st November.
Star rating: 4 stars
This review was originally written for publication by Good News Liverpool
Production photography by Manuel Harlan
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| Joseph Edwards, Mark Edel-Hunt and Susie Trayling |
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| Joe Usher and Mark Edel-Hunt |
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| Mark Edel-Hunt and Peter Hamilton Dyer |
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