Turing still an enigma

BREAKING THE CODE

Royal Exchange, Manchester

(to Saturday, November 19)

THERE are two universal languages at work in Hugh Whitemore's theatrical look at the life and works of Alan Turing; not just that of mathematics, but also that of love and sex.

The play is also a little like one of Turing's early programs, separated into small scenes jumbled into its own askew timeline - though the result works rather well.

I say "theatrical" because as anyone knows who reads about the real Turing according to Andrew Hodges - who wrote the early Eighties biography on which Whitemore and "Imitation Game" writer Graham Moore based their works - it shows a Turing life, not quite the Turing life.

I have seen this play a couple of times in recent years and have always come away wondering just what Turing was really like: the play suggests he could be hard to like, and a little dull and unkempt. That's not really the rather avuncular man in the famous pictures and it's not really the maths genius and deep thinker portrayed impressively by Daniel Rigby here (best otherwise known for playing Eric Morecambe in the TV film "Eric and Ernie").

This Turing hardly wanders across the sparse stage - a desk, a couple of chairs and some rods of light - asking his Bletchley Park boss Dillwyn Knox (an entertaining, extrovert performance by Raad Rawi) to "get out of that", but he's a big, rather friendly but intense scientist in bad clothes with a penchant for spouting long and impressively-remembered monologues about his various mathematical theories and projects.

Despite the chopped-up plot and the story of a fascinating career, Turing's sad demise hits the audience hardest. Turing admitted homosexual acts while reporting a burglary, was put on probation and administered "chemical castration" - a gross miscarriage of justice for the man generally held to have shortened the war and saved millions of lives by breaking the German enigma machine. The government erased the stain on his record years later, long after Turing had committed suicide.

This mundane tragedy, about the man admired by Churchill, the man responsible for much of modern computing and the man responsible for a slice of modern mathematical biology, remains in Whitemore's play steadfastly on the page, with little in the way of action and a lot of talk that director Robert Hastie doesn't quite succeed in bringing fully to life, despite a strong supporting cast.