Breaking the Code: Review

Alan Turing broke the enigma code and played a central part in making sure the Germans did not win the war. But he could not win his own war and to others remained an enigma throughout his entire life. Why did he tell police about his homosexual adventures and set in motion events which would bring about his downfall? Why was he so abrupt in his dealings with others and yet made no allowances for his own actions and the effect they had on people?

Today we might say he was neurodivergent and that he simply saw the world in righteous black and white terms, refusing to make allowances for the everyday compromises in life we all have to make.

The joy of this production is that it gives us Turing the whole man, scientist, lover, son, friend and, yes, the man who hastened the end of the war and who was entrusted with the highest secrets by the government. A government who prized his mind but could not countenance his private behaviour.

Mark Edel-Hunt gives a brilliant performance as Turing, someone who stammers only when talking about the prosaic things of everyday life: when he expounds on the possibilities of science and his quest to invent ‘a machine that thinks’, the stutter fades away. He delivers a Turing who is funny, complex, maddening and entirely at ease with his own sexuality even if others are not.

The play takes in the arc of Turing’s life from idyllic English countryside childhood and boarding school, to the University of Manchester and his scientific work on cyphers and computers, to his disgrace (to others) and ultimate downfall.  There are many laugh-out-loud moments and what comes across strongly is Turing’s zest for life, or more properly, his zest to understand how life is put together and whether a mind can exist outside a body, i.e. in a machine.

Edel-Hunt, while undoubtedly the star of the show, is aided and abetted by a fantastic ensemble cast, including Susie Trayling as his admiring yet mystified mother, Pete Hamilton Dyer who as Bletchley Park head Dilwyn Knox comes across as an amalgam of Rigsby and an eccentric Oxford don, and Niall Costigan as straightlaced police detective Mick Ross who played such a large part in Turing’s prosecution. Special praise must be singled out for Joe Usher as Turing’s young lover whom he met in a pub near Manchester’s Oxford Road station and who would arrange a burglary of the scientist’s home, the unravelling of which would determine the scientist’s fate. Usher plays the young chancer Ron Miller with bounding insouciance.

This is a formidable play acted and directed with wit and warmth and shines a much-needed light on what we like to think are darker times. Let’s hope they never return.

Breaking the Code is at Home, Manchester from 28 October to 1 November 2025.