A sweet tale, but Turing remains an enigma
Alan Turing — A Musical Biography (Riverside Studios, London)
‘GUESS what my computer said to me this morning?’ says a young Alan Turing with a First in Maths, imagining what the marriage of mathematics and machines might produce in the future.
Almost a hundred years on, my Alexa greeted me with: ‘Good morning, Georgina.’ Surely, she should have been named Alan, after the father of computer science and of AI?
His utterance is a rare moment of cheer in this thin, small-scale musical about the tragic Turing, who broke the ‘unbreakable’ Nazi code, so shortening WWII by two years and saving the lives of millions.
Woven through Joan Greening’s rudimentary rip through his life is the mathematician’s preoccupation with the fairy tale of Snow White. Intellectually engrossed by such intangibles as time and space (though often late for school), this eccentric lad is also haunted by a poisoned apple. Is it poison that fascinates him and/or the power of love to awaken the soul? Alas, Greening fails to compute this thought satisfactorily.
Still, several times Turing talks of himself as ‘an odd number in an even world’, a poignant and precise way of expressing a misunderstood mathematician’s sense of otherness.
Joel Goodman and Jan Osborne’s rippling, unmemorable compositions suffuse the piece with melancholy, with Joe Bishop emerging as a more sensitive Turing than Benedict Cumberbatch created in The Imitation Game.
In Jane Miles’s shoestring production (desk, blackboard, bike), Zara Cooke plays everyone else: Turing’s devoted mother, the headteacher who wrote him off as ‘lazy, idle and slow’ and Joan, the young woman who helped crack the code by suggesting that ‘Heil Hitler’ and the weather forecast occurred in every message.
The secrecy demanded from the codebreakers rendered Turing’s triumph unknown and barely celebrated for decades. Instead, it was for breaking a barbaric moral code that he became infamous.
A sad tale, told with lamentably little drama or insight, but with sweetness and soul.