“Alan Turing comes to life in ‘Breaking the Code’… Unlike the film, with a Hollywood spin and too-clever banter that leaves the audience wondering what really happened, Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 ‘Breaking the Code’ – onstage at the Eureka Theatre in an elegant Theatre Rhinoceros production – is a far more satisfying and fulfilling depiction of the life of the scientist, whose admission of homosexuality in the 1950s derailed a remarkable (if little-known) life and career. John Fisher does terrific double duty in the Theatre Rhino show, both directing and portraying Turing, the brilliant yet socially awkward character whose creativity, single-mindedness and iconoclasm posthumously earned him the title “father of computer science.” The ensemble wonderfully complements Fisher in Whitemore’s drama, which remains clear as it flashes back and forth.”
– Leslie Katz – SF Examiner
Breaking The Code The Alan Turing Story
Breaking the Code by Hugh Whitemore is a gripping biographical drama about homosexual scientist Alan Turing, the eccentric genius who fought on two fronts. Turing played a major role in winning the World War II, and he also battled with British morality. He broke the complex German code called Enigma, enabling allied forces to foresee Nazi u-boat maneuvers. Since his work was classified top secret for years after the war, no one knew how much was owed to him when he was put on trial for breaking another code – the taboo against homosexuality. Turing, who was also the first to conceive of and basically invent the computer, the machine that forever altered our modern world, was convicted of the criminal act of homosexuality and sentenced to undergo hormone treatments which left him physically and mentally debilitated. He died a suicide, forgotten and alone. This play is about who he was, what happened to him and why.
Renown British actor Derek Jacobi took the London (1986) and Broadway theatre community (1987 – 3 Tony nominations) by storm in this exceptional biographical drama. Breaking The Code was produced by the BBC in 1996 and broadcast on PBS in the USA. The Imitation Game (2014) – a feature film about Alan Turing opened theatrically world-wide – wowing critics and audiences alike.(Nominated for 8 Academy Award – won for best adapted screenplay, and for 5 Golden Globe Awards.)
BIOS:
Hugh Whitemore (born 1936) is an English playwright and screenwriter. Whitemore studied for the stage at London‘s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he is now a Member of the Council. He began his writing career in British TV with both original teleplays and adaptations of classic works by Charles Dickens, W. Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, and Charlotte Brontë, among others, and twice won a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award. His work for American TV includes Concealed Enemies, about the Alger Hiss case, and The Gathering Storm, which focused on a troubled period in the marriage of Clementine and Winston Churchill just prior to World War II. He won an Emmy Award for each. He also was nominated for his adaptation of the Carl Bernstein/Bob Woodward book about President Nixon, The Final Days. His most recent teleplay was My House in Umbria, an adaptation of the novella by William Trevor starring Maggie Smith. He also wrote the episode, “Horrible Conspiracies,” for the 1971 BBC series, Elizabeth R.
Whitemore’s film credits include: Man at the Top (1973), All Creatures Great and Small (1975), The Blue Bird (1976), The Return of the Soldier (1982), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), and Utz (1992).
The plots of Whitemore’s plays frequently focus on historical figures. Stevie (1977) centred on the life of English poet andnovelist Stevie Smith and Pack of Lies (1983) covered events leading up to the arrest of the Krogers, two Americans spying for the Russians, in London in 1961. Whitemore’s best known work taking the form of a staged biography is Breaking the Code(1986) which is centered on Alan Turing, who was responsible for cracking the German Enigma code during World War II and resisted an adherence to the English code of sexual discretion with his homosexuality, for which he was charged with gross indecency. This work was adapted as a TV film in 1996. The Best of Friends (1987), about the friendship Dame Laurentia McLachlan, the Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey in Worcestershire, shared with George Bernard Shaw and Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. His most recent was As You Desire Me, a 2005 adaptation of the play byLuigi Pirandello. Whitemore is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
John Fisher (Director) John Fisher’s play To Sleep and Dream won the 2014 Bay Area Critics Circle Award for Best Original Script and his 2014 production of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art was nominated for three TBA Awards including Best Production of a Play. John’s other plays include The Joy of Gay Sex, which was produced Off-Broadway, and Medea: The Musical, which was produced in SF, LA, Seattle and as part of the HBO Comedy Arts Festival. Recent projects includeFighting Mac!, named by the Bay Area Reporter as one of the best productions of 2011, SexRev: The José Sarria Experience(a Theatre Rhino production at CounterPULSE). John is a two-time winner of the Will Glickman Playwright Award, a GLAAD Media Award, two L.A. Weekly Awards, a Garland Award, two Cable Car Awards, a SF Bay Guardian Goldie Award, and five Bay Area Theatre Critics’ Circle Awards. He holds a Ph.D. in Dramatic Art from the UC Berkeley and has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and at the Yale School of Drama. John directed the Theatre Rhinoceros productions of David Mamet’s Boston Marriage (2006) and The Anarchist (2015) – both as Bay Area Premieres. He has been Executive Artistic Director at Theatre Rhinoceros since 2002.
Theatre Rhinoceros, America’s longest running and most adventurous queer theatre, develops and produces professional works of theatre that enlighten, enrich, and explore both the ordinary and the extraordinary aspects of our queer community.
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