Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Not a great deal happens in Farm Hall. At least not in the room we are watching. But that’s partly the point of Katherine Moar’s quietly fascinating play. Inside the dilapidated grandeur of an English country house’s drawing room (eloquently recreated in Ceci Calf’s design), six interned German physicists kill time and bicker over pecking order. Outside, the hell of the second world war drags on in the Pacific — culminating in dropping the world’s first atomic bomb. It is in the tension between the scientists’ enforced inaction, their ethical wrangling and the real-life horrors of nuclear explosion that the meat of the drama lies.Moar’s compelling chamber drama — first seen at London’s tiny Jermyn Street Theatre — draws on real-life events: Operation Epsilon, in which German physicists were detained in a bugged house in Cambridgeshire for six months from July 1945. But while the play remains punctiliously period, the moral dilemmas it raises are for all time. How do you retain your integrity amid the viciousness of war? What is right action? Can you pursue a pure scientific goal untainted by its potential abuse? When should you sabotage your own work?To some degree Moar digs over ground already superbly dramatised in plays such as Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and CP Taylor’s Good. This is not as deeply subtle a piece as those works: the issues are rather baldly stated and the structure makes it too static. But Moar has her own quiet, often droll style, making neat use of cultural references to illuminate the role of art in conflict and wittily depicting the mix of brilliance, insecurity and egocentricity that affects the characters.They are uniformly well played by a fine ensemble in Stephen Unwin’s deftly shaped production, the tiniest pauses revealing the rumbling hostility between Julius D’Silva’s defensive party-member Kurt Diebner, David Yelland’s troubled Max von Laue and Alan Cox’s enigmatic Werner Heisenberg.And when Forbes Masson’s excellent Otto Hahn bursts into the room, pale and shaking, to announce that Hiroshima has been bombed, the drama suddenly turns. Petty squabbles give way to real recriminations about the grisly moral compromises of living with a fascist regime and about the failure of the Nazis to build the bomb first. Was infighting the reason? Underfunding? A deliberate choice by Heisenberg to hinder progress (the substance of Frayn’s Copenhagen)? Or did the Nazis’ vicious antisemitism sabotage their own endeavours by getting rid of brilliant Jewish scientists?Hanging over all of this, unspoken but always present, are yet bigger questions about recurrent xenophobia and the morality of the bomb itself — the dismal fact that humanity could now extinguish itself several times over. This is beautifully pinned by Masson’s Hahn (who discovered nuclear fission). He has been a jovial presence, smoothing his colleagues’ easily ruffled feathers, but as they argue the toss he sits, ashen and deathly still, horribly aware of what has been released. His sober response reverberates now, as current wars prompt rash speculation about nuclear force.★★★☆☆To August 31, trh.co.uk
