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.
Continue reading “The Posthumous Papers of the Uranium Club: Farm Hall, Stagecraft, and Lecturing in a Pickwickian Sense”
Harry Heuser 