New York Times, November 29, 1987
The contemporary actor most obviously adept at maximizing the minimal is
of course Laurence Olivier, who was Mr. Jacobi's employer and mentor when he was
an apprentice actor at Britain's National Theater in the 1960's. No one who saw
Sir Laurence's Macbeth in 1955 is likely to forget the power he found in the
three tiny words with which he greeted Banquo's murderers-to-be.
"Well," he said, summoning them to his side with a smile and a crook
of the finger. "Then," he added, firmly pointing out where he wanted
them to stand. "Now," he finished with a sudden, curt and unanswerable
authority. "Well then now"--and Macbeth's lackeys were ready to commit
any atrocity he might demand.
That's admittedly an extreme example, displaying a wider gap between word
and meaning than you'll find in "Breaking the Code." Mr. Jacobi is an
audacious actor, but he can't match Sir Laurence (who can?) when it comes to
creating outrageously unexpected effects onstage. Again, he is not playing
Macbeth, but Alan Turing, not a crazed medieval tyrant bloodily at odds with God
and humankind, but an eccentric modern mathematician and computer pioneer in
trouble with the authorities because of a homosexual indiscretion. Yet if his
invention is less sensational, it's also more consistent. He spends most of
"Breaking the Code" onstage, and much of his time onstage speaking.
And he seems incapable of uttering a sentence without filling it with all the
thought, all the feeling, all the subtlety, all the LIFE which it can possibly
contain.
Consider, as a sort of case study, Act One, Scene Five: It's wartime
Britain, a country house north of London. Here, scientists are struggling to
unscramble the Nazi codes, and most particularly those being dispatched via the
Enigma machine to the U-boats imperiling the merchant convoys in the Atlantic.
If the war is to be won, it's imperative that this device be penetrated and
broken. Enter the precocious Turing for a job interview with the institution's
boss, a genial old mandarin called Dillwyn Knox, played by Michael Gough.
"So you found us all right," says Knox. "Yes, thank you, no
problem," replies Turing. And for a time that's very much the
conversational level: unsurprising, bland, even banal, and dramatically
effective only insofar as it feeds us the background information we need to
absorb if we're to understand what ensues.
Yet that is the impression one receives from the page, not the stage.
With Mr. Jacobi on one side of a table, Mr. Gough drooped over it or perched on
it, and electricity flowing quietly between them, Mr. Whitemore's understated
script becomes not just real, but fascinatingly real. One might at first wonder
if this is because Turing's mannerisms are being presented in such rich and
arresting detail. Mr. Jacobi gasps and stammers, snorts and whoops, gives little
gauche titters, and at one point honks weirdly through his nose like a migrating
goose. As if that weren't enough, he wrinkles his nose and scratches at it,
nibbles at his nails, bends down to fiddle with his shoelace or rub his knee.
But that can hardly explain the scene's growing tension, because we've already
observed plenty of awkward, clumsy social behavior from the same source. We know
that Turing, the mathematical genius, is also a post-adolescent muddle and mess,
with his stuttering consonants and nervous tics, his baggy pants and ineffably
shabby tweed jacket.
But that's only the external Turing and, in this instance, pretty
obviously the outer expression of an inner unease. if one watches Mr. Jacobi
carefully, one can see that he's carefully studying Mr. Gough's Knox. After all,
Knox is in charge of a lab where Turing knows that both his intellect and his
imagination are going to face challenges greater than any they've confronted
before. So he is anxious to impress yet resentful at having to impress,
cooperative yet deeply doubtful about the mental caliber of the man on the other
side of the table. "There's no need to be alarmed," says Knox as he
opens Turing's file. "I'm not," replies Turing a little too abruptly,
his head suddenly moving forward and then backward, like a tortoise wondering
how far it's safe to emerge from it's protective housing.
But this isn't a one-man scene; far from it. Mr. Gough is acting too, and
acting very well. He looks like a benign old mole, blinking half-comprehendingly
at the unaccustomed light. There's something vague and even lost about his
manner, and something oddly off-the-point about several of his remarks; and yet
one senses that he's actually listening most earnestly. Is he exaggerating his
inadequacy? Is he trying to reassure and draw out Turing, who eventually admits
he's worried about coping with institutional discipline? If so, the strategy is
successful, because the mathematician's confidence visibly increases as the
scene proceeds. When Knox asks him about his interest in codes, Turing leans
forward and momentarily becomes dreamy and nostalgic, remembering and sharing a
boyhood enthusiasm. When he's asked how he reconciles his new job with his
one-time pacifism, he allows his "well, I'm here" to sound just a
little mocking and patronizing. A minute or two later, he's exasperated and even
angry, one hand jabbing forward as he emphasizes his patriotism and his
eagerness to battle the Enigma, the other betraying a continuing insecurity by
absently scratching at his leg.
Yet by now Mr. Jacobi's Turing is almost relaxed enough to
launch into one of the play's longest and most important monologues. Knox hasn't
exactly won his trust. Indeed, one senses that Turing feels a slight contempt
for this shambling, apologetic and sadly unscientific old man. But Knox has
achieved something more important, which is to allow Turing to feel his
superiority and even assert a certain toughness of spirit. So, grudgingly and
suspiciously at first, but with accelerating pace and excitement, Turing talks
of the art of math. A splutter of weary derision at the public's ignorance of
the great theoreticians, a triumphant shout of laughter as he describes the
complexity of his own work, then a moment of gravity and quiet as he comes to
his most significant contribution to date: the conception of a thinking machine.
Who would have thought so abstract a subject could excite passion so intense,
mobile and various?
Mr. Jacobi is an actor who conscientiously refuses to preplan a
performance, trying always to react as spontaneously as he can to dialogue and
events that are, after all, supposed to be occurring for the first time ever.
Consequently, he may play the same moment in the scene quite differently from
night to night. When I saw him in London, he spoke the line "Godel's theory
is the most beautiful thing I know" with a kind of rapt awe, like a
worshipper at a shrine; at the Neil Simon Theater recently it was more a
half-embarrassed mumble, and he played with his shoe as he spoke, as if the
subject were too sacred to share with an unbeliever like Knox. That, too, is a
sign of a major actor: a willingness to experiment, up there, on the stage, in
front of the audience; a recognition that reality isn't fixed and unchanging,
but can shift with whatever emotional winds have been generated during the
evening.
And there's plenty more that Mr. Jacobi manages to find in that downbeat
encounter in Act One, Scene Five. For instance, his Turing tells Knox he's spent
the morning before the interview seeing "Snow White" in the local
cinema, and in two sentences manages to mention both that its heroine eats a
poisoned apple and, flashing a tiny smile as he speaks, that its ending is
"quite touching." Just for a moment one notices an innocence,
sweetness and vulnerability inside the uncouth intellectual. It's incongruous,
it's interesting in itself, and it's also important, because at the end of
"Breaking the Code" Turing will kill himself by devouring an apple
laced with cyanide. It is an act that may be despairing, but may be an escape
into what he perceives as a fairy-tale world of imaginative thought beyond the
restrictions of the adult body. Perhaps Mr. Jacobi is preparing for the future
as well as inhabiting the moment.
Certainly, he's enriching the character even further. Imagine an amalgam of Einstein, Peter Pan, the Emperor Claudius, a scarecrow and a bum---and, no, you've scarcely begun to describe Turing as he surreptitiously emerges in what, believe it or not, is still just a short interview for a job.