The biggest and richest tenant of British theatrical premises today must be Albion's answer to Antonio Salieri - Andrew Lloyd-Webber, whose nondairy-product ice cream spectacles are as popular as ever. After all these years, Cats is still pulling them in at the New London on Drury Lane, and out near Victoria Station at the Apollo, Starlight Express shows no sign of flagging, though its best asset - a wonderful black singer called Lon Satton - has deserted London for the Broadway version, which opened this month.
Mixed Feelings
Even in the provinces, Lloyd-Webber, as they say here, "rules OK." Recently, I spent a delightful evening at the Manchester production of Evita, quietly playing "Name That Tune," reminiscing over the Latin American hits of the 1940s and after that crop up, slightly altered, in the score. My chagrin deepened at being shut out of the latest Lloyd-Webber opus, The Phantom of the Opera, now playing at Her Majesty's in Hay-market. This opened to tepid notices but is still booking months ahead; seats are not to be had now for money, for love, nor for the foreign press, either. I regret this, for unlike some professional theatergoers, I can relax and enjoy the bland experience of a Lloyd-Webber show, though not for the reasons he intends. Bless him, he is the only composer I know of who can send you out of the theater whistling someone else's tunes. This may not be the best of all musical or theatrical worlds, but it is surely one of the higher forms of charity, worthy at least of moral admiration.
Leaving good works for the promise of a genuine play, one faces away from Lloyd-Webber's Phantom (no pun intended) and crosses the street to the Haymarket Theater where Breaking the Code holds the stage. In some ways, this is an extraordinary piece. The author, Hugh Whitemore, is one of Britain's better middlebrow playwrights. He likes to handle awkward subjects, and this one is prima facie not just awkward but close to impossible. The play is based on a biography of Alan Turing. If this name leaves the reader looking blank, I direct him to Douglas Hofstadter's amusing book Godel, Escher, and Bach, which asserts, not very convincingly, that artificial intelligence is a viable concept. The book is not the model for the play, but it describes Alan Turing as one of the pioneers in that field and in the design and programming of computers. He was also a leading member of the British team that broke most of the German Enigma codes during World War II.
Breaking the Code is not, however, a wartime spy drama. The Enigma activity remains on the play's periphery, as does most of Turing's professional life. The title carries a double meaning, which highlights Whitemore's real interest in the man - something dramaturgically more promising and certainly more fashionable than higher mathematics. In addition to being a mathematical genius, reclusive, arrogant, and generally an eccentric in the true English fashion (he was something of a mystery even to his mother), Turing was a confirmed and active pederast, thus "Breaking the code" of postwar British society.
The play's texture and some of its facts are taken from Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence by the English mathematician Andrew Hodges. This biography devotes a great deal of space to Turing's ideas and professional accomplishments, guiding the reader through the complexities of Enigma cryptanalysis and explaining such relative arcane as
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