Author: By Kevin Kelly, Globe Staff
Date: 05/27/1987
Section: ARTS AND FILM
''BREAKING THE CODE" -- Play in two acts by Hugh Whitemore
(based on the book "Alan Turing: The Enigma" by Andrew Hodges), directed by Clifford Williams, set by Liz da Costa, lighting by Mick Hughes, at Theater Royal, Haymarket, London.
LONDON -- The best new play in the West End is Hugh Whitemore's "Breaking the Code." It's a probing biography of an unlikely stage subject, a mathematician and scientist named Alan Turing. During World War II Turing deciphered the so-called Enigma Code by which the Germans had U-boat control of the North Atlantic. Later he was involved in developing the computer. Rather than simply putting Turing's life before us in a standard dramatic portrait, Whitemore has written a play of ideas, a kind of Shavian examination of the cost -- in human terms -- of genius. Turing -- brilliantly played by Derek Jacobi -- is a stammering, nail-biting wreck whose intellect more often than not draws attention away from the visible turmoil of his emotional life. We meet him when he's "about 40." In the first scene he's telling a policeman about a break-in and burglarly at his house. In the second scene he's l7, and in the company of a Sherborne classmate, Christopher Morcom. As it turns out both the policeman and Morcom are to impact on Alan Turing's life. He develops a deep homosexual love for Morcom, who is later to die in his teens from tuberculosis. As an echo to his grief over Morcom, which he carries with him until his own death, Turing haplessly reveals his homosexuality to the policeman. In this era when the Wolfenden Report legalizing homosexual relations between consenting adults was yet to be heard from, the revelation causes tragedy.
Behind Whitemore's play is an examination -- and a coldly quiet attack -- on hypocrisy in all its varied forms. Valuable as he is as scientist, Turing's homosexual disclosure calls his loyalty into question, although one has nothing to do with the other. He's accused of flaunting the rules, breaking society's "code," found guilty of a "criminal offense" for picking up a man whom he rightly defines as "a bit of rough from the Oxford Road." He's sentenced to jail, then given probation when he submits to injections of "female sex hormones . . . to kill his male sexual interest." As ironic counterpoint throughout all of this, Turing is counseled by an older, happily married colleague, Dillwyn Knox, who steadily warns him about his behavior which, although hardly flagrant, has caused talk at the Foreign Office and at Manchester University where Turing teaches.
Knox voices the attitudes of straight society. In Great Britain there's a double-standard. While homosexuality is a relatively accepted practice among schoolboys, it's found unacceptable when carried over into adult life. Near the end of the play Turing discovers that Knox, this proper gentleman, this prim but concerned friend, had been the lover of both Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. The irony strikes wider when Turing remarks about the Duke of Windsor "being bounced to exile" because of Establishment hypocrisy: "Mrs. Simpson was okay as his mistress, but as his wife -- never!" Sexual patterns are proscribed. There are acceptable standards covering passion, passing fancies, adultery, even "unnatural" relations.
Whitemore's scenes are taut and dramatic, with no extra words, no special pleading. And Turing has been wonderfully characterized. By turns he's deadly serious, then wickedly funny. One moment he may be a dazzling intellectual talking microchips into philosophy, the next he's a little boy gnawing his nails and longing for love. (His criminal record reads "The Accused had a powerful brain.") He imagines the day when machines may well think for themselves, independent of human motivation. Then he raises a provocative question: "Some people say that thinking is the function of man's immortal soul and since a machine has no soul, it cannot think . . . Who are we to deny the possibility that God may wish to grant a soul to a machine?" He ponders the proposition and adds: "I can see no reason at all why a thinking machine should not be kind, resourceful and beautiful and friendly, have a sense of humor, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love or enjoy strawberries and cream."
What finally happens to Alan Turing is almost as great a mystery as the Enigma Code itself. His death, at 42, is stamped suicide. Whitemore would seem to agree. Yet there's some evidence that Turing's death may have been an accident. His mother persistently challenged the coroner's report. Her reasons, given in Whitemore's penultimate scene, are pretty compelling. Did Alan Turing -- this trusted friend of Churchill, this honored OBE, this tirelessly searching man -- intend to take his life when, to dramatize a point for his class, he dipped an apple in potassium cyanide? The "cyanide" was supposed to have been sugar. Were the real cyanide crystals a misjudgment caused by the lab technician preparing the experiment? Or, at the last moment, did Turing change the sugar to the real thing? Whitemore has Turing raise the poisoned apple to his lips with "the ghost of a smile." His last words are: ''Dip the apple in the brew, let the sleeping death seep through."
When Derek Jacobi begins to stutter his way through Alan Turing, the first thought is that he's repeating "I Claudius," with much the same paranoiac tic. But this is no copycat performance. Within very few minutes Jacobi's Turing is as eccentric, original, winning and tortured as one would assume the man must have been. It's as though Jacobi has worked his way through Turing's mental processes. He shows us the wheels whirring in his head: ideas spinning, gaining momentum, giving him the exhilaration he needs to keep going. It is a great performance. Under Clifford William's first-rate direction it's surrounded by equally impeccable work from: Nicholas Selby as Knox; Isabel Dean as Turing's mother; Angela Down as a woman who loves him; Colin McCormack as the policeman; Paul Bigley and Richard Stirling. One criticism: Liza da Costa's set -- a vast hangar meant as a lot of different places -- is very ugly and, most of the time, peculiarly unsuitable.
"Breaking the Code" is scheduled to open this fall in New York with Derek Jacobi and company.