Where would the Nazis have dropped the atomic bomb? London or Stalingrad?

Farm Hall

at the Oxford Playhouse

from October 16-21

Review by JON LEWIS

SIX German nuclear scientists, three of them Nobel Prize winners, guarded by soldiers, are kept in seclusion in a Cambridgeshire safe house with every room in the building bugged by the security services.

It is the final months of the Second World War.

A true story, the transcripts from the conversations between the scientists form the basis for debut playwright Katherine Moar’s drama Farm Hall, directed by Stephen Unwin for the Theatre Royal Bath and the Jermyn Street Theatre.

The central character is Werner Heisenberg (Alan Cox) who audiences may know from Michael Frayn’s masterpiece Copenhagen.

Moar’s focus is narrower than Frayn’s, but important in relation to the direction of the war.

Did Heisenberg sabotage the German attempt to build an atomic bomb by giving unrealistic figures about the amount of nuclear material needed? If so, why?

In the scenes prior to, and after, the interval, as the scientists listen to the news on the radio, the theatre is filled with the sound of the first atom bomb being dropped in Japan.

The scientists now know that atomic warfare is no longer theoretical. In discussing how the Americans could have created the bomb they wonder if their attempts failed because they could not trust Hitler and the Nazis with the bomb.

Where would the Nazis have dropped it? London, or Stalingrad? What would have happened to the people in the blast zone? Did they want Germany to win the war?

Heisenberg, Otto Hahn (Forbes Masson) and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker wanted the allies to win. Kurt Diebner (Julius D’Silva) and Erich Bagge (George Jones) are more equivocal while Max von Laue (William Chubb) comes across as above these discussions.

Are they all working in science for science’s own sake rather than on how politicians might apply their discoveries? The realisation that an atomic bomb can be dropped on civilians changes the discourses from frivolity to self-reflection.

They all wonder what their futures could be in a bi-polar world between the West and the Soviet Union.

An intriguing, well-acted production about the morality of scientists that raises more questions than it answers.