BREAKING THE CODE
In the 20 or so years following his suicide, Turing was very little known outside a small circle of admirers aware of his important work in the theoretical development of the digital computer, his crucial role in helping the Allies win World War II, and the persecution he suffered in the last two years of his life. Three developments in the 1970s paved the way for Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges, to conduct the research that exhumed Turing from ignominy and indifference: official relaxation of the secrecy that surrounded Turing’s wartime intelligence efforts, the computer revolution that fulfilled Turing’s vision of the widespread uses of “electronic brains,” and the gay liberation movement.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The confluence of these three strands of progress allowed Turing to be appreciated not as a man of compartmentalized contradictions–a genius and hero brought low by criminal sexual urges–but as a man of consistent conscience, whose love of logic made him disinclined to lie when police began investigating his homosexual private life. Hodges, a Cambridge University-trained mathematician and gay activist, wrote Alan Turing: The Enigma (published in the U.S. in 1983) to honor (in Hodges’s words) Turing’s “pride, his stubbornness, and the moral force he brought to bear as a very private, reserved, shy man who nonetheless insisted that [being gay] was not a matter for hiding.”
In emphasizing the arcane and often abstract nature of Turing’s work as well as its practical effects–he helped break the “Enigma” code that was the basis of Nazi military communications–Whitemore has written (and adapted from Turing’s own writings) some of the most intellectual dialogue ever heard on a stage. Yet it’s always dramatically compelling, because of the passionate involvement with which Turing states his points. But to work, it needs an actor of exceptional technique and talent who can find, as Turing did, the poetry in, say, a mathematical analysis of the patterns in a pine cone.
