Oppenheimer

Tom Morton-Smith’s engaging account of the life and legacy of the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, J Robert Oppenheimer, walks a fine line. Morton-Smith’s challenge as a writer is to give this biographical portrait dramatic muscle and momentum while also sketching in the complex scientific, social and political backdrop to the Manhattan Project.

This balancing act, in the play’s first half at least, is well struck. It’s a fascinating and knotty story he’s telling – in a bid to end all war, forever, Oppenheimer would create a device of devastating power. He would, in a sense, become Death – and Morton-Smith tells the story well, without over-playing his research. He embraces the man’s contradictory qualities, his coolness and his heat, contradictions which John Heffernan as Oppenheimer draws out; the physicist is charismatic, ambitious, arrogant, driven, but not a machine, not incapable of doubt or anxiety about what he is about to wreak on the world.

Both the play and Angus Jackson’s production are engaged in an ongoing battle with the cliches of biographical drama of this kind. In the early scenes it is mostly avoided but as they approach the pivotal Trinity tests, the writing begins to feel riper and more heavy-handed. The play is at its best when it places Oppenheimer among a crowd, first at Berkeley and then at Los Alamos, when it shows us his relationship with his equally prickly colleagues, with Jamie Wilkes as fellow physicist Robert Serber standing out among the ensemble.