When Hugh Whitemore’s play based on the life of Alan Turing first appeared in 1986, the man with a key responsibility for deciphering the German Enigma code was something of an enigma himself: a hero to computer scientists but barely acknowledged in the public eye following his prosecution for homosexuality and suicide in 1954. A great deal has changed since then. In the past three years Turing has been officially pardoned by the Queen, become the subject of an Oscar-winning film, two operas and a late-night electronic Prom devised by the Pet Shop Boys, who first became aware of Turing through Whitemore’s play and the biography by Andrew Hodges on which it is based. The exponential growth of the Turing industry inevitably casts Whitemore’s drama in a very different light; though Robert Hastie’s revival does not appear remotely dated. Indeed, our foreknowledge of Turing’s fate elevates the piece from an understated biographical portrait into a compelling modern tragedy.
If tragedy requires the hero to be undone by a fundamental flaw, Whitemore suggests that it may have been Turing’s autism that brought about his fall. In a key scene set at Bletchley Park, a colleague laments that Turing is incapable of speaking anything but the plain truth where a lie might be less hurtful. Whitemore frames the action around a fateful police interview in which Turing, having arrived to report a robbery, haplessly incriminates himself with the admission that he had been having sex with the robber.
Daniel Rigby’s stuttering central performance is almost self-defeatingly diffident but intensely charismatic nonetheless. His awkward posture and scruffy tweeds suggest a giant intellect trapped within the body of an overgrown schoolboy – indeed the only time he becomes truly eloquent is during an old-boy’s address in which he likens the grey matter of the human brain to the tepid porridge served up by his alma mater. One is similarly struck by the child-like regression with which Turing falls into animated discussion with his superior at Bletchley (played with deft, professorial daffiness by Raad Rawi) about his admiration for Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Did this ultimately influence the macabre, fairytale manner of his death, by coating an apple in cyanide? (When Stephen Fry asked Steve Jobs if this had been the inspiration for the company’s logo the Apple chief replied “God, we wish it were”).
Though Turing became the object of at least two unrequited infatuations, Natalie Dew plays a composite of his female admirers with devastating poignancy. Phil Cheadle portrays the prosecuting police officer with the surprise of an angler astonished to find such a large fish has unexpectedly jumped into his net. The clean, minimalist lines of Hastie’s production are enhanced by gentle, pianistic renderings of Radiohead tunes; while Ben Stones’s design is a mesmerising light installation formed of a constantly shifting matrix of suspended rods. It is beautiful and beguiling but, rather like the the computational genius of the central character, rather above most people’s heads.
At Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 19 November. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
