set, film and costume design

Breaking the Code
by Hugh Whitemore, based on the book ‘Alan Turing, The Enigma’ by Andrew Hodges
Royal and Derngate Theatre, Northampton
7 November – 29 November 2003

team

director: Philip Wilson
set, film and costume designer: Pippa Nissen
design assistant: Zöe Radford
lighting designer: Oliver Fenwick

description

The set uses two 6m wide suspended screens at an angle to each other, suspended over the actors on the stage. Below is a naturalistic reduced set of each scene - with carefully chosen furniture from each place and time. This is changed for each scene as a back wall is removed and a revolve brings round the next set of furniture.

The screens show stills or slowly moving images during the main scenes and during the scene changes (which last around a 30 seconds) the rhythm of the film gets faster as the actors walk around the set and the atmosphere of the scene changes. The play goes backwards and forwards in time, from the 1920’s to the 1950’s and 60’s, between his memory and the present day.

This is represented in the set, film and costumes through colour and texture; early childhood is filmed in super 8mm, focused on a still image, so that the fragile quality of his family life is echoed in the film quality and saturated colours. Present day is a mixture of black and white and red, like the graphic techniques from the time where one colour is highlighted. There is also a gradual shift within the film images from naturalistic to abstract, as Turin’s world disintegrates until his final suicide at the end of the play.
press

Lyn Gardner, The Guardian November 13, 2003 ****
‘Hugh Whitemore's 1986 play about Alan Turing, the man who broke the Enigma code during the second world war, invented the computer and committed suicide in the early 1950s after being convicted of gross indecency because of his relationship with a man, has worn well. Almost 20 years ago, it had a successful run in the West End, and it strikes me as exactly the kind of play the West End now lacks. It is intelligent (but not in a jumped-up Stoppardian way), multi-layered in its examination of loyalty and national expediency and full of understated passion. And any play that can make mathematics sexy definitely gets my vote.

Philip Wilson's clean production and fine period detail make the play seem startlingly contemporary. However, the innovative design, with its clever use of film, doesn't entirely overcome the problems of a revolve that can make the shifts of scene and time seem as if they are taking centuries.

It is a minor irritation in an evening that clearly highlights the fact that it was old ways of thinking that ensured success during the war, only for him to fall victim to the suffocating stuffiness and petty thinking of postwar Britain.

There are terrific performances all round, with Zoe Waites outstanding as Pat Green, the brilliant young mathematician with an unrequited passion for Turing, whose usefulness to her country ceased as soon as the war ended. But the evening gets its real energy from Philip Franks, who, as Turing, gives one of the most outstanding performances of the year. It is a superb piece of acting, powered by the searing passion and touching puzzlement of a brilliant man who knows too well that even when all scientific problems have been answered, the problems of life remain.

David Benedict, The Indapendent on Sunday November 23, 2003
‘...Maybe Hall should have hired Tilly Trymayne, excpet that would have eant she wouldn’t have been in the flawless cast of Philip Wilson’s meticulous revival of Breaking the Code. If we’re talking subject matter, Hugh Whitemore’s exquisitely constructed play is about Englishness – by which I mean David Hare-llike concersns of patriotism, idealism, sex, hypocrisy. Which only hints at the power of this profundly moving, emotional and intellectual balancing act. It’s a beautifully understated and underrated gem. It closes on Saturday. Go.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

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