When premiered in 1986, giving Derek Jacobi a key career role, Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code was instrumental in spreading knowledge of the precocious brilliance of mathematician Alan Turing, whose brutal treatment by a homophobic and ungrateful state contributed to his suicide in 1954 aged 41.
Though drawing on Andrew Hodges’ 1983 biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Whitemore was ahead of several later plays and movies, including Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game (2014). So, for a long time, Whitemore and Jacobi’s portrayal of Turing formed his public image, which was inevitably tragic, given that he remained a convicted criminal for loving men and his theories had not yet been fully realised.
