Breaking the Code

Hugh Whitemore

Royal and Derngate Northampton, Landmark Theatres and Oxford Playhouse co-production, with Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse and HOME Manchester

HOME Manchester

October 28-November 1, 2025; 3 hrs

Mark Edel-Hunt as Alan Turing and Carla Harrison-Hodge as Pat in Breaking The Code. All pics: Manuel Harlan

Hugh Whitemore's powerful Breaking the Code has been around since 1986, and during the intervening years its "hero", Alan Turing, has gone from being a relatively forgotten, convicted mathematician and sex offender, through assuming the posthumous mantle of the man who helped the Allies to win World War II, to the modern view of him as a gay icon, with a statue in Manchester's Sackville Street, and his face on the £50 note.

The play has an exceptional cast, a literate script and a clean setting. So why - certainly in the first act - does it feel like a Noel Coward play without the wit?

It may be that the audience knows most of the story already, and is clear about the failure of the state at the time to respect a personal morality. It may be that old fashioned respect for the clarity of the storytelling isn't familiar. Or it might just be that the ideas spinning round in Turing head are a bit too complex for a play?

Perhaps a simple lecture would have been more appropriate - but then we would miss the brilliant acting of Mark Edet-Hunt as Turing with his carefully-calibrated stutter, his inflexible morality and his enthusiasm for that occasionally dry-as-dust subject, mathematics.

Alan himself would no doubt have been proud and respectful of such a performance. The director, Jesse Jones, has grabbed Turing with both hands: anyone who can get an audience to spontaneously applaud after one exposition of a philosophical issue has to be a great actor...

All the cast are supportive and able to play off the main man. Peter Dyer as Knox, his sort-of manager and himself in reality a formidable codebreaker, brings the play alive with his ability to be both a good man and as someone who conceals all sorts of things in the shadows. Knox's passion brings the play alive in a way that illustrates what the early scenes lack - a sense of tragedy, in which the great man brings about his own downfall.

Other actors are all good, with Carla Harrison-Hodge notable as the woman who loves Turing, though she knows he is a homosexual in the 1940s and 50s, when such a state was illegal.

It’s a long play - three hours with an interval - but one that never drags. The shifting scenes are kaleidoscoped to show the evolution of the man. His mother, Susie Trayling, is clearly the villain of the piece (as all mothers usually are). But even she gets redemption and a warm hug from her OBE'd son.

At the end the audience offered a warm round of applause; but only one. If the passion Alan showed for his mathematical concepts had been displayed in both first and second acts, then we would have seen a play that moved both head and heart.

More info and tickets here