Last night I watched Farm Hall at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre. The play is set in the closing months of the Second World War, giving a dramatised account of the internment of a group of German scientists in a country house in Godmanchester. I enjoyed the dramatisation very much, and thought the actors all did a good job of conveying the plausible and different characters of the protagonists von Laue, Hahn, Heisenberg, von Weizsäcker, Bagge, and Diebner, though I have no way of telling if the characters are authentic.
I'm a nuclear physicist, and have grown up in a country whose culture is steeped with the legacy of the Second World War, so the general story is not particularly new to me: I knew a group of German scientists was working on a fission bomb programme, and that they were ultimately not terribly close to producing a final result, and there has been much speculation as to whether Heisenberg, an intellectual leader of the project, effectively sabotaged the work - a question I don't think has ever been answered definitively.
This re-telling of the story has the benefit of access to the transcripts of the listening devices placed at the house where the scientists were interned, so we can hear what they said about their involvement in the war and closeness to the Nazi Party, and their fears for the future.
It seems that this is not the only play covering exactly the same situation, with Operation Epsilon currently showing (until Oct 21st) at the Southwark Playhouse, while Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, deals with another closely-related part of the story. Then there is Friedrich Dürrenmat's somewhat older The Physicists, a more abstracted tale but still effectively dealing with the human consequences of having invented the atomic bomb.
Obviously I didn't take any photos as the play was going on, so here's a picture of me and my wife during the interval
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