Farm Hall review: Spied on in an English country house, explosive rows of the Nazi Oppenheimers, writes PATRICK MARMION By Patrick Marmion Published: 01:00 BST, 16 August 2024 | Updated: 01:14 BST, 16 August 2024 e-mail View comments Farm Hall (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London ) Verdict: Nuclear Nazis Rating: Why didn’t the Germans build the bomb first? Could they have tried harder? These are some of the intriguing questions posed by Katherine Moar in her engaging, drawing-room drama set in the dying days of World War II . First seen last year, at the nearby boutique Jermyn Street Theatre, the play is based on transcripts of six leading German nuclear scientists who were gathered and held by British Major T.H.
Rittner at Farm Hall in Cambridgeshire. They include the great sub-atomic physicist Werner Heisenberg (Alan Cox), and the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of nuclear fission Otto Hahn (Forbes Masson). Having little better to do in the dilapidated stately home that has become their open prison, they read plays aloud, relate the plots of cowboy films, classify plants in the garden, count door knobs and invent a parlour game of ‘guess what will be redacted’ from their letters home.
But when the Americans drop the bomb on Hiroshima, the six men who had all been involved in Hitler’s nuclear programme then lapse into a mix of recrimination, disavowal and envy. The cast of Katherine Moar's production of Farm Hall at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket First seen last year, at the .