The atomic bomb on stage

By Robert Butler

When the atom bomb eventually goes off in Tom Morton-Smith's new play, “Oppenheimer”—which opened at Stratford’s Swan Theatre last night—it’s followed by drunken celebrations. We’re in the desert in New Mexico, where a bunch of physicists are lying in the sand wearing army uniforms and black goggles. The explosion itself is a blackout and a slow deep rumble, but the lights swiftly come up on frenetic dancing at a party. Soon after, we hear an appalling description of what happens when the detonation is repeated over the city of Hiroshima. If the play veers unpredictably in tone in the summer of 1945, losing its earlier assurance, that is no surprise: there can be few bigger challenges, in terms of dramaturgy, than introducing a weapon that kills over 100,000 people.

Till then, the chief pleasure of “Oppenheimer” is the jaunty culture clash between a marvellously eclectic team of theoretical physicists in double-breasted jackets and sleeveless cardigans and the literally-more-uniform US military. They have come together at Los Alamos, the converted boys’ school near Santa Fe, which becomes the Allied centre for “the war of the laboratories”. One army officer cannot believe that a physicist sits on his desk. Nor does he find it fitting that a war should be won by people who make chalk marks on blackboards and put olives in martinis. The physicists aren’t happy either, when the science turns political and secretive. Edward Teller, later to be the model for Dr Strangelove, complains with rich Hungarian testiness: “There is no beauty or elegance in these equations”.