Following a hugely successful run at Jermyn Street Theatre in 2023, war thriller Farm Hall crosses a couple of streets to open a strictly limited engagement in the West End.
This real-life story of top German physicists detained in an estate in Cambridgeshire for seven months after their country’s surrender in 1945 has influenced more than one play.
Farm Hall is informed by writer Katherine Moar’s PhD. research. Alan Brody’s play on the same topic, Operation Epsilon, appeared a decade earlier, and both were seen on the London stage last year.
Set in one room, designed by Ceci Calf with peeling wallpaper and fading grandeur and looking a little lost in a large venue, this play dramatises the detention of six prominent German scientists.
Now given a rather unnecessary interval, Farm Hall is just under 90 minutes of performance, tightly structured and strongly performed by the sextet of actors.
It may be helpful to read up about Farm Hall and its guests before seeing this, although the programme does contain an informative essay on the German attempts to develop the atomic bomb,
The play is neither action-driven nor technically flashy. It is terribly English, despite the characters being German, but never a bore.
Act one is lighter and more mundane as we get to know everyone. Diebner (Julius D’Silva) is a committed Nazi seeking validation, ostracised by the others.
Von Laue (David Yelland), a bookish professor, wants a quiet game of monopoly, not the distraction of a piano.
For Hahn (Forbes Masson) and Heisenberg (Alan Cox), science remains the great driver, even when trying to use calculations to explain the bubbles in champagne.
Bagge (Archie Backhouse) worries about his wife in the Russian zone, while the young Weizsäcker (Daniel Boyd) thrives on his family privilege.
Once the group realise the nuclear bomb has been used, the play becomes a set of excuses, regrets, and whataboutery as the men – suspecting, rightly, their conversations are being recorded – justify their part in discovery and development.
The beauty of the work, the likelihood of its impact on the war should they, Germany, have succeeded. The impact of the forced exodus of Jewish physicists and academics, many who joined the US nuclear programme.
Farm Hall is about rounding up the usual suspects, listening in, then letting them go when the mission is accomplished. The effect of the bomb on Japan is clearly understood and feared.
It’s also about the personal side of ‘the enemy’. These are mainly middle-aged and elderly men longing for their own beds and their wives. They compose letters, read plays, reminisce.
They drink, chat, and play games, rarely commenting on why they were complicit in the rise of the Third Reich. Evading the truth. If you have seen the hit film Oppenheimer, this adds another piece to the puzzle.
Stephen Unwin’s direction thrives on conversation and character. It’s good to see a serious play in the West End and a transfer from such a lovely smaller venue, but I feel a more intimate setting may suit it best.
***
Farm Hall is at Theatre Royal Haymarket until 31 Aug – details and tickets here.
Image credit: Alex Brenner