Mark Irvingsen, Ed Giron and Ben Birmingham (Photo: Bill Pierce)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Topanga Actors Company at Promenade Playhouse
Through February 2
In late spring of 1945, British intelligence apprehended ten German nuclear scientists (including three Nobel prize winners) and whisked them off to a country estate in Cambridgeshire where they were interned for six months before their release in January, 1946. The purpose of this abduction was to learn whether or not Germany had developed the means to make an atomic bomb, one comparable to the horrific device dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year.
To gain this information, the British surreptitiously bugged every room in the manor, which was named Farm Hall. Well housed and well fed, but uneasy as to their fate and bored out of their minds, the men conversed openly, their conversations yielding a series of transcripts that would reveal not only the details of the German project and why it ultimately failed, but particulars about the men themselves — their ambitions, their fears, their feelings about one another, and their shocked reaction to the news that the Americans had produced the bomb and used it.
Marked classified, the transcripts were kept under wraps until 1992 when a fraction of them was released. These transcripts became the basis and/or intellectual inspiration for several plays: Michael Frayn’s ambitious Copenhagen (1998) which, pivoting on a confrontation between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, explores the complexities of an intermingled science, politics and morality, and Alan Brody’s Operation Epsilon (2013), which drew directly on the transcripts to create portraits of these ten historically conflicted scientists.
Katherine Moar’s Farm Hall, which premiered in London last year and is currently being staged by the Topanga Actors Company at Promenade Playhouse, also draws on the historic documentation — and likewise probes the intimidating web of politics, ethics, and science that ensnared these brilliant men. While all were patriotic Germans, some worked comfortably for the Nazi regime while others were forced put aside their principles and doubts in order to survive.
All of them lied to themselves to one extent or another.
Unlike Operation Epsilon, whose characters include representational portraits of all 10 internees and a British officer, Farm Hall has been compressed to six: Heisenberg (Edward Giron), roundly respected as the 1932 Nobel Laureate (at the age of 23) for the creation of quantum mechanics; Otto Hahn (Tom Waters), another Laureate and one of two scientists to discover nuclear fission (the other, Lise Meitner, was a Jew and had fled Germany); Carl von Weizsäcker (Andy Spring), a physicist and later a philosopher from a prominent aristocratic family; Erich Bagge (Benjamin Birmingham), one of Heisenberg’s adoring students; Max Von Laue (Patrick Skelton) another Nobel Prize winner and, most significantly for the purposes of this drama, a strong opponent of the Nazis; and Von Laue’s ideological nemesis, Kurt Diebner (Mark Irvingsen) head of the German nuclear arms program and an enthused party member.
While some of the dialogue is drawn from the transcripts, a good deal is conjured by the playwright, which, at the top, presents these restless scientists whiling away their time with such trivia as play readings of Blithe Spirit, and discussions of old American Westerns. So it takes a bit of time for the conflict to get going, and for this playwright’s strength to eventually come into play. Mainly, it emerges in Moar’s melding of the characters’ personas and the layers of fear, doubt, envy, and sense of loss which she implants in each of them. And tiered over all that is what transpires when the group learns of the American bombing of Hiroshima — the realization, on the part of each one of them, of what their failure or success at building such a device might have meant in their lives and to the world.
Though the current production, directed by Judith Hendra, comes to a meaningful climax, much else that comes before registers as a blueprint for the compelling drama this might have been. Among the ensemble, Waters’ Hahn, whose research ultimately laid the groundwork for the bomb, conveys the warmest, most un-stagey presence.
Topanga Actors Comopany, Promenade Playhouse, 10931 W. Pico Bovld, West LA; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun.,m 2 pm; thru Feb. 2. https://www.onstage411.com/newsite/show/play_info.asp?show_id=7175Running time: one hour and 45 minutes with no intermission.
