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John Heffernan  (Oppenheimer) and Ben Allen (Edward Teller) in the RSC’s Oppenheimer.
John Heffernan (Oppenheimer) and Ben Allen (Edward Teller) in the RSC’s Oppenheimer. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
John Heffernan (Oppenheimer) and Ben Allen (Edward Teller) in the RSC’s Oppenheimer. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Oppenheimer review – an ache for humanity

This article is more than 9 years old
Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
The RSC succeed in making an epic, albeit a remote one, out of this tale of the boffin behind the atomic bomb

The Royal Shakespeare Company was in search of a modern epic of Shakespearean dimensions, according to Tom Morton-Smith, author of Oppenheimer, a new play about the father of the atomic bomb and the man in charge of the team whose bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a programme essay, he tells how Arthur Miller struggled with an unfinishable play about J Robert Oppenheimer, protesting that he felt “too remote from the character’s daily life”.

The atomic bomb is not a subject for the faint-hearted – and the problem of remoteness persists. How do you present complicated science without turning the play into a chalky lecture? How do you keep non-scientists listening? Morton-Smith and director Angus Jackson throw themselves into their task to impressive effect. Jackson’s solution is almost to choreograph the science so we have theoretical physicists moving nimbly about as they talk, or scribbling manically, chalk in hand, on all fours, turning the floor into a blackboard.

The play opens, in 1934, in Berkeley, California – the period atmosphere conveyed with aplomb. John Heffernan plays Oppenheimer convincingly, with distracted angularity and a look, early on, as if savouring a taste – secret knowledge. Yet by the end he confesses to dropping a “loaded gun in a playground”. Oppenheimer is having an affair with Jean Tatlock, a communist, played with unstable gaiety by Catherine Steadman. And you would, in another context, describe his wife, Kitty Puening Harrison (compelling played by Thomasin Rand), as a loose cannon.

Robert Innes Hopkins is the show’s dauntless designer. A silver glitterball above a dance floor in the first half is succeeded, in the second, by a bomb that slides upwards on steel girders: bright blue, sinister, carbuncular – the “Fat Man” ready for Nagasaki. Horror is brilliantly conveyed in sickening calculations about how the pilot who drops the bomb is to escape the blast: the valuing of one life, the indifference to the lives of thousands below.

And with the obscenely named “Little Boy”, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, Morton-Smith takes dramatic advantage by having a real boy (Christopher Kingdom) as the bomb’s mouthpiece. In a splendid 20-strong cast, Ben Allen stands out as surly Hungarian Edward Teller, William Gaminara as intimidating General Leslie Groves and Ross Armstrong as affecting humanist Haakon Chevalier.

At a moment when Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing are subjects for cinema, it is impressive to see science hold its own in the theatre. What is less satisfactory is that even in a play of Shakespearean length, its restless momentum forbids unhurried moral debate. And, just as gravely, because it is crowded with unconnected scenes, one has no bond with any individual – just an overall ache for humanity.

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