'Farm Hall' review – a thrilling wartime drama from the front line of nuclear fission

Read our review of Farm Hall, starring David Yelland and Alan Cox, now in performances at Theatre Royal Haymarket to 31 August.

It’s fascinating when certain topics find their cultural moment. Katherine Moar’s debut play Farm Hall, about six German scientists sequestered near Cambridge toward the end of World War II was a runaway hit at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre some 18 months ago, only to have a second play, Adam Brody’s Operation Epsilon, come along on precisely the same topic.

Now Moar’s play is back, this time for a late-summer West End upgrade at the very playhouse where her father, theatre producer and impresario Danny Moar, has transferred such productions as the recent revival of A View from the Bridge.

And you can see the potency of the material. What writer wouldn’t thrill at the chance to imagine the goings-on behind closed doors of a commingling of some pretty formidable minds? The play offers a report from the front line of nuclear fission whilst raising important issues of responsibility alongside queries surrounding commitment to a regime.

What use are scientific advances if they exist only to lead the world to the Armageddon that was Hiroshima? And how do these considerable intellects square matters of party policy when that now-disgraced regime was, in fact, the Nazis?

Moar has researched the period, and these people, extensively, and one appreciates her desire to illuminate so many individual minds – not just the dogma, and worse, to which they can't help but be in thrall. In industry terms, too, it’s gratifying to see a major theatre like the Haymarket using a gap in programming to allow a fledgling dramatist a shot at the big time.

The thematic terrain is heavy but Moar where possible keeps the tone light. Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit is a shared reference early on, and David Yelland’s Max von Laue, the Nobel prize-winning atomic physicist, wonders aloud whether the men with whom he is billeted might be allowed a game of Monopoly. In musical terms, Schubert gets a workout.

The portrait is of a community in limbo. What are these people to do with their time at the Cambridgeshire detention centre – bugged, of course – that gives the play its title? Will they crack under psychological pressure, riven by an awareness of the reprehensible possibilities allowed by science? Or might they take succour, as one of them puts it, in the fact that “if the Allies wanted us dead, we’d be dead”? What really matters is the waiting game.

At the same time, it’s hard to ignore a bitty feeling to Stephen Unwin’s production made only more evident in this larger auditorium, and the interval feels unnecessary, however much it allows the first act to end on an apocalyptic note. The prevailing feeling is of something determinedly old-fashioned, as if the play weren’t so much set in the 1940s as written then.

That said, the distinguished all-male cast recognise the import of the story they are telling and tear into it with appropriate relish. Forbes Masson makes plain the psychic price paid for Otto Hahn’s pioneering discovery in the world of nuclear chemistry and Alan Cox holds the spotlight as Werner Heisenberg, the theoretical physicist at the centre of Michael Frayn’s acclaimed play, Copenhagen, which itself seems overdue for revival.

You leave admiring the purpose and passion Moar has brought to the table. What’s needed is more outright theatricality that might allow the play, and the players, to take wing.

Farm Hall is at Theatre Royal Haymarket to 31 August. Book Farm Hall tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Farm Hall (Photos by Marc Brenner)