Review: Breaking the Code at the Liverpool Playhouse ****

When playwright Hugh Whitemore wrote Breaking the Code 40 years ago, Alan Turing may have been a huge cheese in the development of computing, but his wasn’t a name commonly known among the general public.

Consider how much has changed since then, and indeed from 30 years earlier than that when Turing’s life was snuffed out aged just 41 in desperately sad – and still contested – circumstances.

Along with Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing, The Enigma and Whitemore’s play, there has been the widespread disclosure of the code-breaking wartime work at Bletchley Park, a Benedict Cumberbatch-helmed film, posthumous pardon for the ‘crime’ of loving other men, a law named after the mathematician and his face currently appears on the rear of a £50 note.

This new touring production, supported by the Everyman and Playhouse, is the first revival since the so-called Turing’s Law (granting posthumous pardons and ‘disregard’ for consensual homosexual acts that are now legal) was introduced.

Marking that fact, a rather earnest new epilogue has been added, written by Neil Bartlett. In all honesty? Given the now widespread public knowledge of Turing, I personally don’t think it needs it – and for me it not only lacks the deftness of touch of the original, but it actually takes something away from the powerful and poignant final moment of Whitemore’s play.

And this is both a powerful and poignant production.

With our understanding of how Turing’s life played out, it’s easy to see him as a tragic and tortured genius, but Breaking the Code offers us a much more rounded and exuberant portrait of a renegade and impish spirit who lived in a strange and wondrous world of his own construction.

Above: Mark Edel-Hunt (right) as Alan Turing and Joe Usher as Nikos. Top: Mark Edel-Hunt. Photos by Manuel Harlan.

There’s a passport photograph of Turing on the Bletchley Park website, taken in the 1930s when he was about to head off to Princeton University, and in it his face is lit up in a huge smile as though someone off camera has just told a roaringly good joke.

It’s this sense of energy and lifeforce which Mark Edel-Hunt brings to his portrayal of the mathematician and computing seer in a mesmerising central performance.

The story starts in 1952 with Turing’s spurious report around a burglary at his Manchester home and then unfolds in a series of flashbacks to key moments in his life including his Sherborne schooldays where he indulged in a youthful passion for maths and machines and for a bright and urbane fellow student.

Edel-Hunt's Turing, a roiling bundle of nervous energy, has a terrible stutter when stressed but speaks freely and eloquently when enthused about his favourite subject – maths, the application of maths, and particularly the idea of creating an ‘electronic brain’ which could think and learn for itself. Behold the birth of AI.

Above: Mark Edel-Hunt as Alan Turing and Peter Hamilton Dyer as Dillwyn Knox. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

He brings this complex man vividly to life in what is a masterfully delivered performance of a challenging script full of mathematical ideas and conundrums.

But he also mines Turing’s emotional hinterland, and projects a tangible sense of warmth and vulnerability - in his relations with the men whose orbits collide with his (played by Joe Usher) and also his Station X colleague Pat, played by Carla Harrison-Hodge and based on the real-life Joan Clarke who was a fellow cryptographer in Hut 8 and to whom he was briefly engaged.

Meanwhile he has a hugely enjoyable foil in Peter Hamilton Dyer as Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox, the Greek scholar and veteran cryptologist who inducted Turing into the Government Code and Cypher School – aka Station X, aka Bletchley Park – on the outbreak of war.

And Susie Trayling brings a quiet dignity to Turing’s mother Sara, who would later work to keep her son’s flame alive.

Turing was without doubt a victim of less enlightened times, and there’s a forever ‘what if’ about his early death and what he might have achieved if he had lived.

But he himself didn’t frame his existence through a lens of victimhood, and he deserves to be remembered not only for his genius but his courage in living his life the way he wanted to – something which shines through in this captivating and accomplished revival.