BREAKING THE CODE. Chester to 2 March.

Chester

BREAKING THE CODE
by Hugh Whitemore

Gateway Theatre To 2 March 2002
Runs 2hr 50min One interval

TICKETS 01244
Review Timothy Ramsden 2 March

A grateful country is never grateful for long as Chester's solid revival of Whitemore's play makes clear.In the early 1940s Alan Turing helped win the war against Nazi Germany. Researching what would become computer technology, this brilliantly creative mathematician discovered how to crack Nazi Enigma codes. A decade later, with naive honesty, he ruined his academic career, and life, by admitting, while reporting a burglary, a then illegal homosexual relationship.

Richard Derrington expresses Turing's intense, naïve enthusiasm for his work and a loneliness behind it. It's a shame Sue Wilson couldn't have taken his performance further down the less-is-more path. It tends to play the nervous mannerisms at some expense to character depth.

At first Lennox Greaves seems set to run through the decent-copper, firm-but-fair, performance routine. Fortunately he develops Ross as a baffled man, duty-bound to proceed against Turing, and explain why – almost in words of one syllable – to the genius in his police station.

It's an interesting contrast Whitemore sets up, and a pity he doesn't develop the role of the secret service type listening-in. There's a further contrast when we move back to wartime and find Turing working at a Bletchley Park governed by a bumbling (and, it's eventually revealed, closet gay) boss.

In another head-on opposition, Michael Hugo captures the dim-minded, worldly-wise post-war youth on the fringe of crime, who has his pride as well as his price.

Shirley Dixon provides a picture of the fond mother in Guildford, with a post-Victorian mind in which questions of her son's devotion to the friend who died young raise no suspicion. And as the fellow Enigma-cracking scientist who not only loves but understands Turing, Maria Gough sympathetically bridges the gap between the routine minds that fit in this world and the unworldly brilliance tormented into self-destruction by that world

Martin Johns' set is formed of building-block shapes re-assembled to create various anonymous spaces, on a geometrical outline recalling the clinical world of 1950s sci-fi films. It's a surprisingly successful, and practical, design response for the measured control of Wilson's revival of a play well-worth seeing in an age when computers and varied sexual preferences both seem, to most, a natural part of life. .

Alan Turing: Richard Derrington
Mick Ross: Lennox Greaves
Christopher Morcom: Jamie Chapman
Sara Turing: Shirley Dixon
Ron Miller: Michael Hugo
John Smith: Brian Hewlett
Dillwyn Knox: Kenneth Gilbert
Pat Green: Maria Gough
Nikos: John Trakos

Director: Sue Wilson
Designer: Martin Johns
Lighting: Nick Beadle
Sound: Jim Sobocinski

2002-03-05 10:09:26