“You’re not responsible”, a colleague tells the distressed professor as he considers Hiroshima’s destruction. For Nazi apparatchik Kurt Diebner (Simon Rhodes) the group’s prior failure to work together to supply Hitler with the same capability is the main regret.įor Hahn (a stately and impressive turn from Nathaniel Parker), whose 1938 discoveries directly opened the door to nuclear fission, it is the terrible human consequences that press most. For some, initial disbelief gives way to competitive fury “What matters is the world knows now we’re second rate” says one, apparently despairing of how peers will judge them. News of America’s successful bomb hits the assembled scientists with the force of a well-aimed grenade. “England is almost tolerable in the summer” says party member Dr Erich Bagge (a fittingly querulous Matthew Duckett), but tolerance is soon in short supply. ![]() Heisenberg (an excellent Gyuri Sarossy who twitches like a demented sparrow), much the most morally ambiguous of Brody’s solidly drawn characters, takes de facto leadership of the group, which soon fractures along dramatically satisfying lines: young versus old, Nazi versus apolitical, chemist versus physicist. Katherine Moar’s Farm Hall, seen this spring at the Jermyn Street Theatre, covers the exact same events a tad more economically. The questions that the piece poses about the moral implications of pursuing research destined to open the door to a device of mass destruction, echo those in the recent Hollywood blockbuster Oppenheimer. The objective is to find out how close ‘Hitler’s Uranium club’, as the group are known, have come to creating Germany’s own nuclear device.Īlan Brody’s Operation Epsilon, a decade old and here in its UK premiere at the Southwark Playhouse, does an efficient job of bringing some drama to the true story of the scientists’ incarceration. ![]() For six months their conversations are clandestinely taped and transcribed, a possibility which seems genuinely not to occur to several of the brightest brains on the planet. In July 1945, after VE day and shortly before the United States detonates atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ten of Germany’s most talented physicists and chemists, including three Nobel Prize winners, Werner Heisenberg, Professor Otto Hahn, and Max von Laue are flown to the UK.Ĭonfined incommunicado in Farm Hall, a country pile near Cambridge, they are restricted from leaving the grounds (even signing a gentleman’s agreement to that effect) and left to reflect on the collapse of the Nazi regime and their own part in Hitler’s rule.
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