Theatre review: Operation Epsilon

I've talked before about how similar, highly specific ideas seem to crop up on different stages around the same time, but this is a whole new level of specificity: Alan Brody's Operation Epsilon is the true story of the German nuclear scientists who were captured by Allied forces near the end of the Second World War, and held at an English country pile so that the British and Americans could ascertain just how close the Nazis had come to developing nuclear weapons. And yes, this is based directly on the men's actual conversations, recorded by the military in secret. If I sound like I'm repeating myself it's because that was also the premise of Katherine Moar's Farm Hall, which I was a big fan of when it premiered about six months ago. I guess you can blame Oppenheimer for everyone deciding the other side of the story would hook audiences.

Southwark Playhouse has opted for an existing show, although this production is the UK premiere of an American play that debuted in Massachusetts ten years ago with some of the same creative team.

So Andy Sandberg directs Gyuri Sarossy as Heisenberg, the one who's definitely the best-known name because people know their history, and not just because of Breaking Bad. The unofficial leader of the disparate teams that had been working on a nuclear engine (they swear blind, no matter how unconvincingly, they never thought they were working on a bomb,) he comes with his own protégé in Jamie Bogyo's Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and has assumed a similar figurehead role here.

The other candidate for most lauded figure among the scientists is Otto Hahn (Nathaniel Parker,) who rushed to be the first to publish his findings on fission and has spent the rest of his life regretting the destruction it could lead to. One prisoner whose presence is a bit more cryptic than all the others is Max von Laue (Simon Chandler,) the only one of the ten men not to have actually worked on the nuclear project at all; a question hangs over just why the Allies want him in the middle of all the other scientists.

Sandberg's production certainly looks and feels luxurious: Janie Howland's two-level set is impressive (although it does shunt the scenes in the British officer's quarters way off to the side,) the cast is large, and for the second time in this venue's first year of existence it stars an Olivier winner and Tony nominee called Parker. But I'm not sure the scale really helps create a coherent drama: It's sometimes hard to stick to my personal rule of not negatively comparing a show to an earlier one (usually productions of the same play, to be fair,) but I couldn't help noting that while Moar cut the cast down to six core characters, Brody has kept ten plus a British officer, and not all of them feel particularly fleshed out.

I also felt a lack of focus: Once the news breaks of the US attack on Hiroshima, opening the scientists' eyes to just how far behind their rivals they'd actually been, a great deal of time is spent putting together statements for the press which will make them look competent to their colleagues while distancing them from the Nazis they were actually working for. No doubt a lot of the recorded conversations do indeed expose these great minds as being essentially petty and self-serving, but it doesn't quite gel into a story. When Matthew Duckett's Bagge, always on the verge of a full-on toddler tantrum at the best of times, compares their situation to a concentration camp, their easy-going host Major Rittner (Simon Bubb) finally loses his rag; it felt like it should have been a much more pivotal moment than it ended up being. Operation Epsilon has a lot of positives, but while I sometimes come out of a play suspecting there's a better story to be made out of the material, in this case I know it for a fact.

Operation Epsilon by Alan Brody is booking until the 21st of October at Southwark Playhouse Elephant.

Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith.