Farm Hall (Jermyn Street Theatre)

Verdict: Explosive atomic fallout

★★★★

THE year is 1945. Six nuclear scientists tasked with producing an atomic bomb for the Nazis have been spirited out of Germany and detained in shabby quarters within a stately home, Farm Hall.

Bugged by the Secret Service, bored and claustrophobic, these brilliant minds are reduced to rehearsing Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit — and none has the talent to amuse.

They can’t talk serious science. The chalk scribbles on a blackboard of molecules under pressure turn out to be an effort to work out how bubbles are put into champagne.

In Katherine Moar’s quietly riveting debut — partly inspired by transcripts of covertly recorded conversations — the clashing personalities and moral positions of the scientists are skilfully established.

Highly- competitive, they squabble like schoolboys. Weizsacher (Daniel Boyd), the son of a diplomat, has charmed the absent landlord into giving them a piano. David Yelland’s Nobel prize-winner Von Laue would have preferred Monopoly. Though he would probably not have played with Diebner ( Julius D’Silva), a pompous, humourless Nazi.

Fellow Party member Bagge (Archie Backhouse) is indulged as he’s the cheery son of a locksmith and the student of Nobel Prize-winning, unreadable Heisenberg (Alan Cox). Warm, wise Hahn (Forbes Masson) presides. He is the genius who discovered nuclear fission, the physics behind the atomic bomb. Which is the play’s catalyst.

When a radio broadcast reports that the Americans have dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, the Germans are forced to question why their science failed where the U.S. succeeded. And a tearful Hahn feels personally responsible for the deaths of thousands.

Fascinating stuff: the unforeseen implications of scientific discovery come under intense scrutiny by a writer to watch.