Alan Turing – A Musical Biography: this tribute to a national hero fails to compute
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The history of musical theatre is littered with unlikely subjects for shows – and to that list we can now confidently add Alan Turing. The life of that genius cracker of the German Enigma code and father of modern computing is endlessly fascinating in both professional and personal spheres: Turing died aged just 41, seemingly by suicide, after being prosecuted for the “gross indecency” of homosexual acts. A biographical drama of Turing, as evidenced by Benedict Cumberbatch’s Oscar-nominated performance in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, is always compelling. Yet what songs might add to this is unclear.
Undaunted, Joel Goodman and Jan Osborne have set Turing’s life to music, in an 80-minute two-hander that largely plays out like a dramatised Wikipedia entry. There’s a compelling refrain in which Turing describes himself as “an odd number in an even world”, but that aside, we long for Joe Bishop (Turing) and Zara Cooke (everyone else) to stop singing and revert to Joan Greening’s not particularly inspired script.
Greening whizzes us through Turing’s life in desultorily impressionistic snapshots. In the first scene, he is late for primary school and says that if he could travel at the speed of light, he would be early. At secondary school, a close friend of his dies of TB (cue a song stating that “friendship’s an equation”) and next thing we know he is graduating from Cambridge. It strikes me as highly unlikely that women really did graduate in the same degree ceremonies as men in the early 1930s, but, never mind, Turing is now on a cycling tour of Germany where a newspaper headline talks of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives.
We keep abreast of Turing’s movements and career progression via his letters to his genteel mother, who is slightly disappointed – “I always had such high hopes for Alan” – that her brilliant son isn’t a doctor. Jane Miles’s skittish production at last settles down and gains some much-needed depth when it arrives at Hut Eight of Bletchley Park, the unprepossessing place where the code-cracking magic happened. Here, Bishop has a chance to allow us to get closer to Turing’s idiosyncratic genius, as he develops a friendship with fellow mathematician Joan Clarke.
Turing proposes to bluestocking Joan and they seal the deal with a handshake. Cooke is at her most affecting when, after Turing breaks off this short-lived engagement, Joan says softly, “You were better than no one.”
A hat stand, a blackboard and a stationary bicycle fill the stage, although the unforgiving rake of the auditorium meant that there were times when I struggled to see either of the actors. It’s tiring that theatres are still subjecting audiences to such basic practical problems in 2024; I’d bet that Turing and Clarke could have sorted out the issues with the incline in a heartbeat.
Until Jan 27. Tickets: 020 8237 1010, riversidestudios.co.uk
