Alan Turing’s life was without doubt dramatic, from the cracking of the Enigma code and breakthroughs in computing to his prosecution for homosexuality. The 2014 film The Imitation Game is proof that his life makes for thrilling storytelling.
The decision to set it to music in this two-hander is harder to fathom and the raison d’etre for Joel Goodman and Jan Osborne’s musical, as a whole, remains a mystery. The production is an emotionless survey of a life with weak songs, a thin book by Joan Greening and glacial pacing from director Jane Miles. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that its words were originally extracted from Turing’s letters and academic papers.
It is puzzling too that the show has played, in different incarnations, since 2022 yet has the halting quality of a rehearsal. Joe Bishop is a too-understated Turing, pausing and mumbling so some lines are difficult to catch. Zara Cooke puts more energy into playing every other character, from Turing’s mother to his (brief) fiancee Joan Clarke.
The script skims through his life, from Cambridge to Princeton to Bletchley Park, but leaves holes. We hear that the young Turing is “slow” in class, but in the next scene he is graduating with a first. His best friend at school, Christopher, dies of TB and a song suggests Turing was sexually attracted to him, but it teems with opaque lyrics: “The exponential way I feel is the paradox of loving him.”
The songs are at first forgettable, then dreary and finally whiny, the awkward lyrics laden with mathematics. The voices are thin, sometimes alarmingly out of tune, and the glut of songs gives the singers nowhere to hide. Although Bishop and Cooke wear microphones, they are still difficult to hear at times.
We get to Turing’s sexuality in the latter part of the production, when he is convicted of gross indecency and chemically castrated. His suicide is dramatised through a letter, written by Turing’s brother and read out by his mother, but all the drama is leeched from it. Even at 80 minutes, the production drags and the only enigma here is how Turing’s life could be turned so dull.
At Riverside Studios, London, until 27 January
