The Posthumous Papers of the Uranium Club: Farm Hall, Stagecraft, and Lecturing in a Pickwickian Sense

No horses—wild, domesticated or strictly metaphorical—would have dragged this fool (meaning, yours truly) to see Only Fools and Horses, a musical adaptation of a 1980s Britcom that made hay of nostalgia at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, where it enjoyed a record run before the stable doors closed, at last, in April 2023.  How relieved was I then, returning to London after an eighteen-month-long hiatus, to find that what I assumed to be legitimate drama or, at any rate, a show beyond the dog-and-pony variety had returned to a venerable venue where, over the years, I had taken in plays as varied as William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000), and James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter (1966).

Granted, none of those theatrical evenings—certainly not the heavy-handed 2015 revival of the delightfully immaterial Harvey—were more memorably dramatic than The Rivals, during the 23 December 2010 performance of which I witnessed a member of the cast gallantly jumping off the stage to assist a fellow theatregoer suffering a stroke.

Nothing approaching such drama, scripted or otherwise, materializes in the course of the ninety minutes or so that historian Katherine Moar sets aside for the development of her episodic “snapshot,” as she calls it, of Farm Hall, the titular setting of a play about what happened in the summer of 1945 when a group of German nuclear scientists—members of the Uranium Club—were being kept under surveillance at a house in Cambridgeshire, only to learn, listening to news broadcast by BBC radio, that the United States had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Did that first and, to this day, only wartime deployment of a nuclear weapon constitute a failure of German scientists to get there first? Did it signify the success of the Allies to harness the power of theoretical physics and international research, given that many of those German scientists, being Jewish, had been forced to leave the Third Reich? Or might that so-called failure have resulted from a strategic refusal by scientists remaining in Germany to align their theories and practices with the objectives of a regime intent on “total war” and “final solution”? 

What a set of questions to ponder.  What a setting for historical drama.  And what a source of regret that Farm Hall nearly squanders all that.

Immediately prior to seeing Farm Hall, which transferred to Theatre Royal Haymarket for a limited, four-week run in August 2024—I had visited Cambridgeshire for the first time.  I had no idea that I would end up being recalled there via Moar’s historical fiction.  Had I known, I could have taken advantage of my relative proximity to Farm Hall at the time—had I been cognizant of its existence and historical relevance—by storming the barn, as it were, and as Moar has done.

Not that I believe history can be absorbed through the soles of one’s feet; but I enjoy going on location, my footsteps mingling belatedly with those who came before me. A few days earlier, I had spent a night in Mr. Winkel’s Room at The Leather Bottle, a somewhat run-down inn near Gravesend that was frequented by Charles Dickens and is featured in his first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836).  

Numerous memorabilia displayed there manage to create a sense of history by piling stories upon story like so many layers of dust or gossamer.  Some stories are authorized, others ancillary or seemingly of no account—an assessment depending on the ones doing the accounting and the discounting of strands of story that then become the casualties of causality.  Take, or leave, for instance, the brassiere I discovered in my nightstand and that, to me, betokened a recent one-night stand and a hasty departure … or just poor housekeeping.

How to create a bespoke memorial made largely of verbalized memories? That is a challenge researcher-turned-playwright Moar, opting for conventional drama as her vehicle, had to grapple with, based as her play, Farm Hall, is, in part, on declassified transcripts of recorded conversations that were constructed from records gathered, assessed and annotated by Jeremy Bernstein and published in 1996 as Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall.  And yet, as Moar points out, only a small fraction of the recordings (five percent or so) survives as transcriptions, other chatter having been deemed too negligible to preserve.

Clearly, Bernstein realized that there is drama in those surviving records.  Rather than relying entirely on chronology for their curation, he imposed a loosely dramatic structure on the material, as headings such as “Prologue” and “Cast of Characters” suggest.  Hitler’s Uranium Club was republished in 2001 following what Bernstein, in the Preface to the Revised Edition, refers to as the “remarkable success of Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen,” which is indebted to Bernstein’s research.

“Michael Frayn, of course, addresses the uncertainty surrounding the German atomic bomb project head on in Copenhagen,” Moar acknowledges in the notes on her play, as published in the program.  Focusing on the character of Heisenberg and expanding imaginatively on his “Uncertainty Principle,” Frayn makes indeterminacy central to his investigation.

Copenhagen, with which I caught up, as a radio play, only after seeing Farm Hall, contemplates not merely history but its telling.  Conjuring the dead, Frayn introduces us to disembodied voices from the beyond to reflect on the playwright’s quest to make sense of historical sources in ways that Moat’s proscenium-bound approach largely disregards.  Wordy though it is, Copenhagen does not equate word with thought.  Rather, it explores the boundaries of the knowable—the false memory, the falsified record, the potentially fallacious interpretation.

Any aware educator knows how difficult it is authoritatively to say, “I don’t know” or “I am not sure.”  Farm Hall does not problematize its conjecture, its filling in of the gaps, which makes it problematic as a history play, let alone as a history lesson.  Naively and in vain I scoured Bernstein’s transcripts for references to Madame Arcati, the Ringo Kid, and Gulliver’s Travels, cultural references strewn across the surface of Farm Hall.

Moar seems to insist that her play is educational only in a “Pickwickian sense,” Pickwickian being a term that, albeit rarely used now, we owe to Mr. Dickens.  Using a word in a “Pickwickian sense,” broadly speaking, means to disown it, especially so as not to give offense.  Who, after all, wants to be lectured during a night on the town?

Whereas Frayn attempted to get into the hearts, minds and memories of his three dead protagonists—Niels Bohr, Bohr’s wife, and their not entirely welcome visitor, Werner Heisenberg—Farm Hall presents us with the personas that the great minds of science, including Heisenberg, present to each other and to those they come to suspect of listening in.  Theirs are masks that Farm House in turn fashions into flat characters or outright caricatures, a state or status from which they could not quite recover.

From the start, Farm Hall struggles clearly to set the scene and define its territory.  The play opens with a ninety-second voice-over of a phone conversation in which the German physicist Max von Laue tells his wife Magda (who made the call but, like so many women in history, is rendered inaudible on the other end of the line) that the “Dutchman” Samuel Goudsmit asked von Laue to “leave now and go with him.”

If alert enough while settling in, audiences can glean from the term “American Zone” that the Second World War is over, in Europe at least; and we hear from von Laue that Goudsmit seems to be “rounding up all the physicists left in Germany.”  We are not told why von Laue and his wife are separated or where they are, what the circumstances were that led to Max von Laue’s detainment—if that is the word—at Farm Hall, and what Operation Epsilon was all about.

What is at stake? Is von Laue, whom we hear first, proposed as the central figure in a group portrait that, for the sake of expediency, is reduced to six—von Laue, Erich Bagge, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Diebner, Otto Hahn, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker—whereas Farm Hall had housed ten German scientists? Are we to pay closer attention to von Laue and invited to experience what unfolds from his perspective? As it turns out, von Laue’s perspective is not privileged. It is the playwright’s—and it is the playwright’s prerogative to cut those giants down to size.

In Farm Hall, those scientists—six characters still in search of an author?—are introduced to us as a gaggle of adolescents.  “[Y]es, these people were incredibly intelligent,” Moat said in response to the questions what she hoped that audiences would “take away from the production”; “but,” she adds, “they were also just people who experienced and were governed by the whole spectrum of human emotion: anger, jealousy, pride, joy, and everything else.”

Very well, but, unlike in impactful drama, the “spectrum of human emotion” telescoped in Farm Hall is not translated from the start into anything amounting to insights into the relationships between personal ambition, nuclear science, and national identity.  While Rome burns, these men fiddle-faddle.

Listening to the banter, one wonders whether Farm Hall is some kind of Funny Farm.  We witness the inmates rehearsing Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, which is as close to an acknowledgement of her efforts to raise the dead as Moar gets. As if to justify her absurdist approach to historical records, Moat has her characters pick up on a line from Coward’s play: “Not exactly old-fashioned, darling, just a bit didactic.”

Farm Hall is historical—and patronizing—in a Pickwickian sense, withholding much that might have mattered more than the petty squabbles of protagonists who complain that they have “[n]othing to do but sit and talk and argue.”

“Where is the substance?” one character exclaims in response to Coward’s play, at which point I was beginning to wonder as to the nucleus of Farm Hall, or, rather, its missing core.  

Within those crucial first few minutes, Farm Hall exhausted itself and my patience by showing … what?—that brilliant minds can behave like pubescents? “They basically revert to being schoolboys,” Moar said about the men that are the characters of her play; but, since that play begins atavistically, with the comic deflation of so-called genius—“Only Fools and Six Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” anyone?—I found it difficult to take what is said subsequently quite seriously.

Little is made of the opportunity to examine, for instance, that what being “German” meant at that moment in history was dramatically changing, and what this meant for those among the scientists, who, like Kurt Diebner, had been appointed the administrative director of the Third Reich’s nuclear weapons program as authorized by Adolf Hitler. In Farm Hall, Diebner is reduced to pompous buffoon who pouts at being ostracized.

In retrospect, I gather that I was meant to appreciate that these men feel themselves to be in limbo, removed as they are from a world that, it comes as a shock to them to learn, has been changed forever by chain reactions unfolding without them.  The Hiroshima bombshell dropped on them at the end of part one shakes things up considerably in part two of Farm Hall—but it drops too late to make much of an impact, dramatically.

No doubt my frustration with the architecture of Farm Hall stems in part from the advertising campaign for the play, which is more suited to a disaster movie.  The graphic art chosen to promote it—an atomic cloud emanating from a residential building in a rural Western setting—creates expectations that Farm Hall is not designed to meet.  Then again, the poster features a snippet from a four-star Guardian review, which, to my mind, falsely advertises the play as a “riveting wartime thriller.”  Horsefeathers!

“Just because you know the recipe for an omelette doesn’t mean you can cook a nice one,” one of Farm Hall’s historical stand-ins exclaims.  I am not sure what recipe was being followed here, but the ingredients are fairly wasted.  However many eggheads it tries to cracks, Farm Hall has none of the fluidity of Copenhagen; nor is it quite Copenhagen coagulated, either.  Rather, it is like a helping of Copenhäagen-Dasz, a cloying mess of largely empty calories that has been dropped onto the boards and left there.  Take it from me or leave it, you will not get the scoop on Operation Epsilon by stepping into the puddle.

• Threads