"Breaking the Code". Oxford Playhouse

This revival of the late Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 play about the life of Alan Turing (the man who broke the Germans’ Enigma Code during World War Two) is as timely as it is gripping.

Ironically, the title is itself a cryptic clue. The Code it’s referring to is only partly the secret messages from U-boats. Much more important to the play is the other code Turing was instrumental in breaking: the oh-so-English societal code that branded homosexuality as depraved, evil and illegal. The pivotal event in Whitemore’s play is not Turing’s dismantling of German passwords, but his arrest in 1952 for sodomy. Turing himself, as portrayed by Mark Edel-Hunt, is a magnetic, vivacious, obsessively focussed and irrepressibly jolly figure. Even when explaining that the English legal system has given him a choice of two punishments for his acts of gross indecency (imprisonment or chemical castration) he conveys a self-effacing charm that almost stops you realising how horrifically he was treated.

Edel-Hunt has also perfected Turing’s stammer and nervous tics, constantly nibbling at his fingers, wiping his hair and stumbling with his words. It’s particularly moving to see how his speech impediment evaporates whenever he gets onto the subject of mathematical problems. Derek Jacobi originated this role (no doubt off the back of I, Claudius), but Edel-Hunt makes it his own. It may be that, not too far in the future, parts like this will only go to speech-impaired actors. But that is a debate for another day. In the meantime, this is a stellar piece of acting.

The play weaves backwards and forwards in time, linking moments from Turing’s youth with his work at Bletchley Park and his later life. It subtly suggests that his scientific and his sexual interests were more closely connected than might at first appear. Both took him into a world of secrets, outcasts and coded language: a separate society where he could be safe, and truly express himself and his passions. For Alan Turing, mathematics was a way to be accepted. Only in the cocoon of Bletchley could his boss Dillwyn Knox (a deliciously fusty Peter Hamilton Dyer) say, ‘I couldn’t give a damn whether you choose to go to bed with choirboys or cocker spaniels’.

Breaking the Code had a vital message when it first appeared in the 1980s. Homosexuality may have been legal for nineteen years by then, but many gay men still lived double lives, in fear of ridicule or worse. This was the era of ‘queer-bashing’, of Small Town Boy and Bernard Manning. Breaking the Code was part of a vanguard of gay theatre (including Bent, Rent and Angels in America) that helped change all that. But it’s no museum piece. Jesse Jones’ richly textured production gently but persuasively makes the case that we still need that message today, when new generations of minorities struggle for acceptance. Turing’s legacy feels as powerful as ever. At least now we have ‘Turing’s Law’, that grants posthumous pardons to gay and bi men who suffered under our unjust laws – and at least we now have him on our £50 notes.

There’s another layer to this production which makes it feel even more relevant today. And that is Turing’s fascination with Artificial Intelligence. He talks incessantly about the potential for machines to learn, to become more knowledgeable than the people who program them. He was, in effect, a forecaster of ChatGPT, and this play is equally prophetic. At one stage, Turing tells us that he believes we will have intelligent machines by the year 2000. He wasn’t far off.

But once again, Whitemore’s writing finds a link between AI and Turing’s own sexuality. Turing sees computers as disenfranchised minorities. He wants to give them thoughts, feelings, voices. At one point he even tells us that machines have souls, and that he wants to teach them to hum tunes and write love letters. It’s a plea for gay rights in allegorical form. And when, in the second half, Turing delivers a lecture directly to the theatre audience – with the house lights on, making us effectively part of the play – the passion behind the performance is inspiring.

But this is no one-man show. Mark Edel-Hunt is surrounded by a strong cast who ensure the show never descends into polemic. Susie Trayling is wonderful as Turing’s mother, horrified and despairing in the central coming-out scene where she can barely say the words ‘Nancy boy’. I was reminded of Ron Kovic’s mother in Oliver Stone’s Born of the Fourth of July, shouting in denial, ‘Do not say penis in this house!’ Niall Costigan succeeds in being both merciless and sympathetic as the by-the-book policeman Ross, and Joe Usher, playing a series of lovers, is at once opportunistic and genuinely loving. It’s all complex and three-dimensional (unlike so much computer-based content these days).

Given the changes in attitudes since the play was first staged, Neil Bartlett has written a new epilogue in which a boy at Sherborne School gives a speech about Turing in 2025, suggesting that the freedom gay men now enjoy is thanks in part to his bravery. It’s perhaps slightly too comfy a way to end this play, which feels like it still has a lot to warn us of. Without Alan Turing’s work, we may not have computers, phones or online dating (and how he would have loved that!). But the message that stayed with me as I left the theatre, pensive and moved, was the one from Wittgenstein, quoted by Dillwyn Knox: ‘When all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely unanswered.’