Farm Hall
22 August 2024
Theatre Royal Haymarket
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
Farm Hall had an incredibly successful run at the Jermyn Street Theatre last year, and is now being staged at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. It’s a story based on real events, but treads an unexpected path.
Summer 1945, Germany is defeated and six of its most successful nuclear scientists, including three Nobel Prize winners, are detained in a country home outside Cambridge. They do not know what the plan for them is, but believe themselves to be safer here than in a war-torn country being fought over by Allied Forces. Information on the outside world is kept to redacted newspapers and equally redacted letters, but when they are informed that the Americans have been successful in building a nuclear bomb, and the consequences of its devastating explosion in Japan, tensions run extremely high, as fears for their future and guilt over their involvement mounts.
As a slice-of-life play, this one comes with very high stakes. Six men with different views, backgrounds, and varying levels of power in the fallen regime, thrown together through their work in nuclear physics. Their characters clash as they discuss their own responsibilities and fears, opposing viewpoints broken down and examined with rage and compassion in equal measure.
The staging is simple, just one room of a run down country house, but it is highly effective for a play that relies on the power of its words alone. A touching and thought provoking probe into people’s motives and subtle ways in which power could be wielded even by the powerless. Possibly one of the most compelling and deep reaching, yet understated and subdued plays on the subject, Farm Hall is a fascinating dive into the minds of six men imprisoned by their circumstances and having to come to terms with their own culpability.
