THEATRE REVIEW: Love song of Electric Bear at Netherbow

Published on Wednesday 1 May 2002 01:00

****

IS there something sexy about mathematical codes? First we have Enigma, the film about war-time codebreakers, then the life of mathematical genius John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.

Now Edinburgh University Blueprint productions presents the superb premiere of Snoo Wilson’s richly symbolic and poignant play, Love Song of the Electric Bear, which delves into the heroic life, loves and death of Alan Turing, mathematical genius and Enigma codebreaker.

He was also the founder of computer science, a philosopher and gay - a man who lived well before his time.

His story was previously dramatised in the 1986 play Breaking the Code, starring Derek Jacobi, which toured successfully worldwide, disproving Jacobi’s reported fear that "Homosexuality is box office, but not mathematics"

Wilson’s play, directed by his son Patrick, opens with Turin’s death by cyanide poisoning in 1954. "Why did he kill himself?" Clemmie Churchill asks her husband - before we pirouette like a regressive dream back to his childhood.

This is a tightly choreographed, talented ensemble play of numerous characters with Al Gilmour taking the role of Turing from the ages of 14 to 42.

With an astute sense of psychological control, he captures confused adolescence, the awakening of a brilliant scientific brain and latterly a nightmarish mind full of scorpions. Cool and charismatic, Gilmour is reminiscent of a youthful Jeremy Irons.

Turing feels he has never been or can be fully understood - "Everything dissatisfies my father" he complains - and his only solace is his constant companion and alter-ego, Porgy Bear (Michael Wroe) with whom he discusses life, mortality, Foucoult’s pendulum and binary codes.

With Porgy, he clings on to the innocence of childhood, particularly his favourite film Snow White, while tackling the complex creation of a Universal Machine, a computer.

"What is theoretically possible, is possible," he believes.

Fast-moving scenes in Cambridge, Bletchley Park and New York are economically yet vividly staged, such as the exhausting number-crunching work of the code-breakers.

At the end, Turing’s mind is tortured. His heroic war work saved the nation but ironically the state turns to destroy his soul.

Like Hamlet, it’s the story of the end of innocence, humanity and truth. Even Porgy Bear loses his heart.

Run ended