Oppenheimer at The Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon

5/5

J Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is reputed to have reacted to a 1960s play on his life by complaining that the writer had made a tragedy out of a “damned farce.”

That documentary play by Heinar Kipphardt, a largely sympathetic treatment of a figure regarded as a scientific superman, focused on the investigation — virtually a trial — of Oppenheimer in 1954, the time of the McCarthy witch hunts in the US.

It questioned his loyalty to the US, leading to the withdrawal of his security clearance and the end of his career as a practising physicist.

Unlike Kipphardt’s work, Tom Morton Smith’s Oppenheimer is more of a dramatised graphic novel, ending with the climactic achievement of the Manhattan Project, the carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a fundamentally changed world.

The writer works through a series of short scenes taking “Oppie” and his friends and family from the heady 1930s of left-wing enthusiasm for the Soviet new age and support for the left struggles in the Spanish civil war, through the gigantic efforts to beat the nazis in the race for the bomb — a competition which turned out to be illusory — to the final catastrophic triumph.

One can appreciate how the RSC would welcome a new play with a figure that could be seen as a modern successor to Shakespeare’s great tragic protagonists and although I believe Oppenheimer, if he were alive, would reject the characterisation of himself as a new Hamlet, Morton-Smith has created a figure of equal ambiguity. This Oppenheimer is arrogant, vulnerable, egotistical, offensive and charming at the same time.

John Hefferman captures all this. Here is a man bathed in the adoration of nearly all and the resentment of a few. Women fall at his feet, while his affair with the bomb consumes him like a Frankenstein monster.

Hefferman’s body language, travelling from easy self-assurance through to a commanding and even ruthless determination and then a final and disintegrating dejection, reflects a human being trapped in the cross-currents of history and his own psychological make-up. He leaves behind broken and betrayed lives — his women, his brother and his closest friend.

Morton-Smith’s play does not need to portray the hero’s fall. It is all there in Oppenheimer’s final lines: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”

Angus Jackson’s innovative production, moving like an express train, alternates wild parties with wittily constructed classes on the fun of fission versus fusion. The audience are made to work but a brilliant cast helps by never letting the action flag.

Runs until March 7, box office: rsc.org.uk