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There’s nothing about Alan Turing’s bleak trajectory (from code-cracking, OBE-winning wartime heroism to unjust disgrace and early death) that screams “musical theatre”. But, surprisingly, there were two separate attempts to give Turing’s life the song-and-dance treatment competing for attention at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Now, one of them is calling in at London’s Riverside Studios after some substantial rewrites, offering an atmospheric reflection on Turing’s life that nonetheless doesn’t hit the right notes.
The dialogue for Alan Turing — A Musical Biography was originally drawn verbatim from his letters, and narrated by a fictional biographer. But as the programme explains, when its emerging composing duo Joel Goodman and Jan Osborne met playwright Joan Greening at the Fringe, she persuaded them that she should give the script a substantial revamp: one focused on the story’s fraught relationships.
The resulting show takes a workmanlike trundle through a story that will be familiar to anyone who has seen 2014’s Benedict Cumberbatch-starring film The Imitation Game. We meet Turing when he is an ingenious but under-appreciated schoolboy, bent on solving elaborate mathematical conundrums while his exasperated teachers wish he’d knuckle down and focus on his Latin (a refreshing contrast with today’s STEM-obsessed education system). But soon, he encounters fellow pupil Christopher Morcom, a co-conspirator who fires up his heart as well as his brain.
Joe Bishop looks the part as Turing, but his attempts at a convincing performance are hampered by repetitive, sketchy songs, uninspired lyrics (“I’m an odd number in an even world”) and lumbering plotting that gives him all the inner life of a broken calculator. He stars opposite Zara Cooke, who plays everyone else — mother, teacher, friend, policeman — with the help of a rather rusty toolbox of regional accents.
The pair’s onstage relationship feels most convincing when Turing finally gets to the second world war code-breaking centre Bletchley Park and meets Andrea, his collaborator. Cooke beautifully captures her inner conflict when Turing proposes marriage, the deal sealed with a businesslike handshake rather than a kiss. Is a loveless match with her colleague worth it for the companionship, for a burst of excitement from her despairing mother?
Greening’s book doesn’t bring the same depth to a far more pressing question: Turing’s own feelings about his sexuality. At one point, he sings “I was born the way I am — a proud gay man”, expressing a sentiment more familiar from contemporary pop lyrics than the lives of real 1940s men, living in a world where homosexual acts were both stigmatised and illegal. This is Turing’s story stripped of its pain, shame and passion. These emotions never made it into his carefully self-censored letters, but without them, his life stays an enigma.
★★☆☆☆
To January 27, riversidestudios.co.uk
