Breaking the Code: A riddle wrapped up in an enigma

Breaking the Code

at the Oxford Playhouse

from Tuesday, October 7 to Saturday 11

Review by JON LEWIS

Why was one of Britain’s Second World War heroes pilloried by the country he saved? It’s a puzzle that Hugh Whitemore explores in his 1986 play Breaking the Code. Despite Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s support for mathematician Alan Turing in using his scientific genius to break the Enigma code, he was prosecuted by the state for breaking an entirely different set of codes.

Enigma was a German cyphering machine that encoded and decoded messages that were vital to U-Boats in attacking North Atlantic convoys between Britain and the US. It’s not part of Whitemore’s plan to dramatise how Turing and his team broke the code which subsequently helped the Allies win the Battle of the Atlantic. Instead, Turing’s momentous achievement stands as a metaphor for wider issues within society.

Jesse Jones’ Royal & Derngate Theatres Northampton revival of Whitemore’s play now includes an epilogue written by Neil Bartlett that explains Turing’s importance today: indeed, he is the face on the £50 banknote.

The play’s relevance in a time of increasing intolerance revolves around the accepted codes that Turing broke in his everyday life. The opening scenes take place in a police station where Turing, a professor in mathematicss at Manchester University, is making what seems to be an implausible complaint to an inspector about a burglary in his home. Mark Edel-Hunt convincingly makes Turing, a stammerer, both confident and diffident.

Turing is often nervous at home with his conventional mother (Susie Trayling) worried about entertaining his best friend and a fellow pupil, another science freak, Christopher (Joseph Edwards) during the holidays. He is in his element at Bletchley Park, the secret code-breaking establishment in Buckinghamshire, recruited from Cambridge University.

His close friendship with fellow cryptologist Pat (Carla Harrison-Hodge) reveals his homosexuality. His life in Manchester University in the 50s sees him pick up a rent boy and petty criminal, Ron (Joe Usher), an act that leads to the fateful breaking of legal codes. The play sizzles when it’s evident that Turing’s thrills in making computer codes are of equal to those of breaking them with Ron.

A sympathetic portrait of a true hero.