If people today know of Alan Turing, it’s generally for his thought-invention of the Turing machine and as a codebreaker for the British during WWII. Turing’s “other” machine, the Bombe, was designed to decipher Germany’s Enigma encryption device. It’s less known that he was persecuted for being gay by the very government that had relied on him to save it; what’s an Order of the British Empire against a gross indecency charge in 1952?
Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 play, Breaking the Code, has already proven its popularity; it was nominated for three Tony Awards and two Drama Desk after an ’87-’88 run on Broadway. Strawberry Workshop Theatre’s production of Breaking the Code (through October 9, half-price on Thursdays) boasts no Broadway glitz. Actor David Pichette happened to be sitting next to me and mused to a companion that this is how it should be done, in a space that puts everything on the actors. (No surprise, Sheila Daniels directs.)
Bradford Farwell stars as Alan Turing, and it’s a performance that makes you forget there must be someone named Bradford Farwell who doesn’t act like Turing at all. (Farwell’s BS in mathematics and London dramatic training make the role seem predestined.)
He stammers, sweats, slouches, seduces, and soliloquizes (about machine logic) with an unusual intensity. Even while trying to bed the 19-year-old rough trade (a jumpy, coy, prideful Tim Gouran) who will lead to his arrest, he can’t stop himself from pushing words together into the blocks that will outline the shape of his big ideas about mental processes. (It is peculiar that in extremis Farwell’s English accent took a vaguely Germanic turn.)
Reportedly, concern about Whitemore’s play’s saleability was due to its dealing with the sensitive topic of mathematical theory, not Turing’s homosexuality. There is more math discussed here than I’ve seen in many years onstage, but Whitemore provides you a full portrait of the man (even to the extent of eliding what Turing’s cryptanalysis actually produced: The decoding of Enigma messages skyrocketed from 50 a week in 1940 to 3,000 per day in 1943).
Instead we tag along through Turing’s life as–out of chronological order–he fatefully reports a robbery, visits home with a school chum (Alex Garnett, whose underplayed performance is the more striking as you come to realize his character’s importance), goes ’round to pub, interviews for a cryptography position, visits home again with the female co-worker he’ll not marry, and is regularly interrogated by a detective (Galen Joseph Osier), himself a curiously driven man, bound to enforce laws that (for the purposes of the play at least) he has no sympathy for.
As Hitchcock pointed out, the tension only grows when you know a bomb is going to go off, and so it does as you inescapably grow attached to the brash, eccentric, brilliance on display, knowing that his downfall is stalking him–visually, in the form of a poisoned apple, as Whitemore makes an analogy between suicide and sleep and dreams of sweet princes.
Strawshop surrounds Farwell with remarkable talent: Charles Leggett adds a majestically frozen upper lip to his repertoire in the role of Dillwyn Knox, Turing’s crypto-mentor; Amy Fleetwood is Turing’s mother, and manages to suggest whole continents of interior life in just a few scenes; and Alycia Delmore loves half-unrequitedly as Pat Green, the woman Turing has a deep intellectual friendship with, but no hope of sexual chemistry.
Though the set from Greg Carter is spare, it’s effectively suggestive, with an exploded proto-computer soaring overhead and a Fibonacci spiral on the ground, and LB Morse’s light design signals scene changes and outdoor picnics with equal sure-handedness. Ron Erickson’s costume design is in part scenic design (parades of white shirts and black skirts–Daniels’ blocking is always meaningful, linking scenes and furthering the play’s momentum), and its unassuming deftness is only jarred by what I assume is the predilection of the day for enormous fedoras that make the men who wear them look like little boys in dad’s clothing.
Strawshop presents this play as part of their “gay martyrs” series, but despite the ’50s setting it’s not really a story about the hang-ups of the closet; the play invites you to share in Turing’s blunt incredulity that the state had any interest in two men masturbating each other in a private home. It becomes clear that, for Turing, society had the closet problem, not him.
It’s also true that today Turing’s personal eccentricities would surely be chalked up, pop-culturally at least, to Asperger’s–his social ineptness and unwarranted trust that others will get the big picture, if only it’s explained, are hallmarks, as well as his lifelong interest in charting the mechanics of thought. Leggett’s character, Knox, tries to explain to Turing the use of discretion in one volcanic scene, but it doesn’t take, or at least not in time.
The compulsory estrogen treatments did not “cure” Turing of his homosexuality, and he did not long survive his encounter with the mechanics of prejudice–his security clearance revoked and social standing ruined. The play postulates his means of escape, but you can also imagine that he simply choked on the meanness of it.
Go see StrawShop’s “Breaking the Code” tonight. ***Don’t wait till the last few shows are sold out.***
This truly is one of the seminal plays of the twentieth century. If you know a kid who shows some talent in mathematics, but they aren’t too sure what it’s good for, take them to this excellent production. They’ll see something that is rarely dramatized convincingly: how pure intellect was essential to the fight against fascism. They will also see how the hypocrisy of Democracies almost rendered that victory meaningless.
I have only one minor complaint with the script. The moment of discovery of the solution to the Enigma code is not shown. Neither is Turing’s discovery of his own nature, as a homosexual and as a gifted mathematician. Whitemore may have been a bit too concerned with avoiding biographical convention.