Breaking the Code
Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 play about the criminalised mathematician has been revised, with a new epilogue by Neil Bartlett, to reflect Turing being pardoned in 2013. This new version has been produced in collaboration between the Oxford Playhouse, Royal & Derngate, Northampton, Landmark Theatres and in association with Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse and HOME.
The play first premiered in 1986, starring Derek Jacobi as the mathematician Alan Turing, and was instrumental in highlighting the tragic treatment he received after being outed as a homosexual and being convicted of offences which led to his suicide in 1954 aged 41.
But Turing has now been pardoned by the State, and even features on the £50 note, with recognition of what his role was in cracking the Enigma code which led to our success in the Second World War. We owe him a debt of gratitude, rather than the criminalisation and indignity that he suffered in the post war years. Not only in cracking the Enigma code, but also his work which undoubtedly led to the development of computers, and the AI revolution.
We’re told in the play that Bletchley Park was picked as it was equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge. The fact that this revival started at Northampton, just down the road, and is touring to Oxford, as well as it being a joint venture between the Northampton and Oxford theatres, as well as other illustrious production houses, is very fitting.
The addition of a new epilogue by Neil Bartlett, set in the present day at Sherborne School, where Turing had been to school, allows for a touching speech by a modern day pupil, highlighting the brutal way the state had treated the man they owed so much to. It allows a much needed posthumous redemption.
As for this production, I thought it was truly excellent with the central character, Mark Edel-Hunt giving a tour de force performance. His brilliance shines through. Again, using our modern lens, Turing was clearly neurodivergent, but at Bletchley, and in the world of mathematics and science, he found his tribe. Mark Edel-Hunt played him just perfectly. We saw his quirks, his fragility and his social difficulties. We felt his pain. We felt the difficult relationship with his parents, and his peers, but we also saw his pride in his work, and his excitement at the breakthroughs. It is an extraordinary performance.
He is well matched by his other cast mates. We see two sides to the wonderful Susie Trayling as Alan’s mum Sara as well as Smith, a shady establishment character; Niall Costigan as the Police officer Mick Ross, unwittingly (at first) ensnaring Turing; Peter Hamilton Dyer as Dillwyn Knox, who recruited Turing to Bletchley; Carla Harrison-Hodge as Pat Green, his Bletchley colleague; Joe Usher, very effective as Turing’s love interests, and Joseph Edwards as a Sherborne student in the 1920s and 2020s who deliver the new epilogue as a current-day sixth-former who no longer needs to hide his own sexuality.
The play moves backwards and forwards in time, and so we get to see different stages of Turing and some of the other characters’ lives and ages. All the actors are excellent.
This is a remarkable piece of theatre, telling an important story, which has been updated in an even more important way. Unmissable.
This show was reviewed on the 7th October 2025 at Richmond Theatre where it runs until the 11th October 2025. Tickets available here: Breaking the Code | Oxford Playhouse
Review written by Ruth Hawkins
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Photo credit: Manuel Harlan
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