The real story of code-breaking genius Alan Turing
OLT play rights some of what movie got wrong about the code-breaking genius
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If you’re seeing the play about Alan Turing, be prepared for a much different story than the one seen in the movie about Alan Turing.
The movie The Imitation Game came out last year and thrilled many viewers — it earned Oscar nominations — but the story it told of Turing was, to use computer lingo, corrupted. Perhaps most egregious was how the film, which portrayed how Turing broke Germany’s Enigma code and helped the Allies to win the Second World War, whitewashed the man’s homosexuality.
The play, titled Breaking the Code: The Alan Turing Story, written by Hugh Whitemore and to be staged at Ottawa Little Theatre, takes a closer look at Turing as a gay man, and is, the theatre promises on its website, “a more accurate depiction of one of the greatest minds of the past century, and his persecution.”
Turing, in real life, made no secret of his homosexuality. His candour helped bring about the government’s persecution of him for being gay — which was illegal at the time. In a ghastly bit of British history, which is portrayed in the film, the government had Turing “chemically castrated.”
I’m one of millions of people who enjoyed The Imitation Game, although my admiration was undermined when I discovered its many inaccuracies. Oh, how naive of me to expect verisimilitude from Hollywood.
Shaun Toohey, the Ottawa school teacher and actor who plays Turing in the OLT production, is more forgiving.
The theatre promises on its website, ‘a more accurate depiction of one of the greatest minds of the past century, and his persecution.’
“I thought it was a very good movie, really well acted, very exciting,” Toohey says. “I thought they did a really good job of making this rather tedious process — which was breaking the code — into something quite exciting, something which kind of had you on the edge of your seat.” Still, Toohey acknowledges the movie “certainly wasn’t an accurate biography of the man.”
Much of the movie is fiction. Just a couple of many examples include the crossword puzzle that Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley) solves to be hired for the code-breaking team at Bletchley Park, though in fact Clarke already worked there when the project began. The subplot about a Soviet spy in the code program was “ludicrous,” says Andrew Hodges, who wrote the biography from which the movie and play are adapted.
The Internet abounds with condemnations of The Imitation Game, and not all from your anonymous, pyjama-wearing basement-dwellers. The Guardian newspaper in England said the movie portrayed Turing as “the ultimate misunderstood boffin,” and the paper took umbrage at the subplot about Turing not exposing the (fictitious) Soviet spy.
The Guardian asked, “Were the makers of The Imitation Game intending to accuse Alan Turing, one of Britain’s greatest war heroes, of cowardice and treason? Creative licence is one thing, but slandering a great man’s reputation — while buying into the nasty 1950s’ prejudice that gay men automatically constituted a security risk — is quite another.”
Also inaccurate is the pretence that Turing “invented” the computer. In fact, computing devices existed at the time, albeit primitive by today’s standards. What Turing invented, says Freeman Dyson, the great physicist and writer, is “software, essentially. It’s software that’s really the important invention,” Dyson told the Washington Post. “We had computers before. They were mechanical devices. What we never had before was software. That’s the essential discontinuity: that a machine would actually decide what to do by itself.”
I’m with New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, who cited The Imitation Game on its many inaccuracies, but hailed it for its actors. The cast was strong, led by the exquisitely named Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing. (An aside: whenever I walk by Harry Rosen men’s store in the Rideau Centre, I have an urge to walk in and declare, “I want a new cumberbatch, and none of that cheap stuff. I want a benedict cumberbatch!”)
Anyhow, as I was saying before I interrupted myself, Shaun Toohey also makes a credible point that the movie was about breaking the code, and not about Turing ’s sexual orientation.
“Had they purported to tell his whole story, I probably would be a little more upset about it,” Toohey says. As far as breaking the code goes, “how important was his gayness to that? It really didn’t have any effect on it.”
Toohey does wish the movie had spent more time on Turing’s life after the code was broken and the war was over, when persecution ultimately drove the national hero to a premature death that may have been suicide (though that is disputed).
“I think that’s an incredibly interesting and tragic story,” Toohey says, “and a real lesson for us, something for us to look back on and go, ‘Wow, yes, things have changed, and we still need to change and improve.’ ”
As for the sort of man Turing was, the movie presented him as a savant, almost autistic in his interactions with others, and utterly hapless with women. False.
When Toohey began to research Turing’s life — he waited to see the movie only after he got the role at OLT — he saw a much fuller picture of the man, as both computing genius and gay pioneer.
“He was a gay-rights advocate without being a gay-rights advocate. He wasn’t marching down the street with a flag, but he was living his life as he chose,” Toohey says. “He didn’t make any excuses, he didn’t lie about who he was, and he just kind of expected everyone to do the same.”
Breaking the Code plays at the OLT to May 23, directed by Klaas van Weringh. After performances on May 12, 13, 19 and 20, patrons can see a real Enigma machine, and talk with code-breaking historian Richard Brisson.