Theater: Ingenuousness And Genius BREAKING THE CODE

The title of Hugh Whitemore’s elegant and poignant biographical play contains at least four layers of meaning. Taken together, they explain what intrigued Whitemore in the life of Alan Turing, an obscure if influential British mathematician. The most obvious reference is to Turing’s cracking the Nazi Enigma code, credited by Winston Churchill as a key intelligence feat of World War II. Confronted with an enemy that could change its code in a trice, almost infinitely and randomly, via a complex encrypting machine, Turing outwitted the device by building a sort of early computer. A second allusion is to the code of moral orthodoxy, which Turing violated by his homosexuality. He compounded that transgression by disregarding the Oxbridge gentleman’s code of discretion. While homosexual colleagues retained their posts because they did not flaunt their preferences — some went so far as to marry — Turing disdained convention.

Eventually he collided with the code of criminal law. Innocently mentioning his liaisons to a policeman while reporting a burglary at his home, he abruptly found himself transformed from victim to accused criminal. In a Britain that had not yet legalized homosexual relations between consenting adults, the resulting trial cost him his reputation, his work, even his masculinity: to repress Turing’s sexual urges, a judge ordered him treated with female hormones. He was subsisting on university research in 1954 when, in a bizarre echo of a favorite movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he killed himself by eating an apple soaked with cyanide.

Although a chronological account of Turing’s life might make a solid social- problem drama, Whitemore and Lead Actor Derek Jacobi, who shared in the play’s conception, plainly wanted something beyond gay-rights advocacy. In successive productions they have focused ever more on the intellectual insights that made Turing unique without losing either his eccentricity or his humanity. The complex structure of flashbacks and flash forwards, monologues and dreamlike incidents is meant to convey something of the flavor and psychological sources of his genius. Much like Mozart in Amadeus, this sophisticated thinker seems suspended emotionally in adolescence. As Turing, Jacobi speaks beautifully, zealously, of his passion for science but stutters and splutters when meeting other people. All the energy of his psyche seems to have gone inward. He remains romantically fixated on a long-dead schoolmate who is a living, palpable presence in the play. In Jacobi’s haunted portrayal, giggly boyishness not only coexists with soaring intellect but is essential to it: learning to live within the codes of adulthood would shut down this man’s wonder and imagination.

Jacobi, a Shakespearean best known in the U.S. for the title role in the PBS mini-series I, Claudius, again employs fidgety mannerisms. But Turing emerges distinctly in his fierce, futile independence. Although joined by fine, mostly British actors — Jenny Agutter, Michael Gough and Rachel Gurney among them — Jacobi gives what approximates a masterly one-man show. In a brilliantly calibrated scene near the end, he makes Turing’s happiest moment also serve as a sad metaphor for his yearning, and inability, to communicate. He enfolds himself in the arms of a Greek youth, neither able to speak the other’s language. Embraced, contented, he is still alone with his thoughts.