![David Yelland and Forbes Masson in Farm Hall at the Theatre Royal Haymarket](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000389868785_17236355242790_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqP-t--XiuvYMJPd4Ncdgt2haFS7t6wUD2c5CAYw-u7FY.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Farm Hall: Debut plays seldom come more gripping than this
Katherine Moar’s Second World War drama, exploring the complex ethics surrounding the atom bomb, works superbly in its West End transfer
![David Yelland and Forbes Masson in Farm Hall at the Theatre Royal Haymarket](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000389868785_17236355242790_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqP-t--XiuvYMJPd4Ncdgt2haFS7t6wUD2c5CAYw-u7FY.jpeg?imwidth=680)
In these deep days of August, the majority of theatrical attention is focused north of the border, to the all-encompassing jamboree that is the Edinburgh festival. This means that intriguing opportunities can arise for unusual productions to take up residence in the West End for short runs, which is precisely what has happened for this gripping slow burn of a Second World War drama.
Farm Hall, by debut playwright Katherine Moar, premiered in spring 2023 (the same year the comparably themed Oppenheimer swept all before it at cinemas) at the consistently high-achieving Jermyn Street Theatre, a boutique studio venue just off Piccadilly Circus. It became the bestselling show in that theatre’s history, but there are terrible moments at the start when we fear that what went down well in a 70-seat space will look hopelessly over-exposed and underpowered on the Haymarket’s lofty stage.
Gradually, delightfully, our anxieties are assuaged as Moar and confident director Stephen Unwin settle us into this fascinating but little-known true story, with faint echoes of Michael Frayn’s modern classic Copenhagen. It’s July 1945 – war is over in Europe but still blazes in Japan, and six of Germany’s leading nuclear scientists have been spirited away in secret to be held in a most genteel sort of imprisonment in the titular country house outside Cambridge. Their every move and word were recorded, supplying a powerful imaginative springboard for Moar.
The sextet mills about in the manner of benignly forlorn longstanding guests at a hotel of fading grandeur, gamely acting out scenes from Blithe Spirit, attempting to compose letters home that will make it past the censor and generally indulging in much gallows humour. What, they wonder, will happen to them when the British government grants them their freedom? The characters gain in shading and nuance: everyone defers to stately Von Laue (David Yelland), Heisenberg (Alan Cox) is the quasi-ringleader and Diebner (Julius D’Silva) is politely ostracised for reasons that are revealed later.
There are, mercifully, no dreadful cod-German accents to contend with, as everyone speaks in crisp RP. The action runs for a nippy hour and three quarters (including an incredibly well-placed interval), and at the end of the first half there comes the era-defining news that the Americans have built an atomic bomb and dropped it on Japan.
![Alan Cox in Farm Hall at the Theatre Royal Haymarket](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000389868787_17236365676700_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
The sparks truly start to fly after this, as the group begins with recriminations over past rivalries, before moving into murkier terrain. With all their collective research and Nobel Prizes, what degree of culpability do they bear for the dreadful end result accomplished by the US?
Cox cuts an intriguingly ambivalent figure, implying that Heisenberg knows far more than he will ever be prepared to admit. How did the American succeed in the nuclear race where the Germans failed so spectacularly? Was it intellectual superiority bolstered by greater government resources? Or could a moral factor have been part of a decidedly non-mathematical equation?
The mere mention of the word “physics” customarily makes me shiver in solidarity with my bemused 13-year-old self, but Moar persuaded me to sit up and pay keen attention – and I am extremely glad that she did.
Until Aug 31; trh.co.uk