We were booked in to see two plays this month. One was The
Shoemakers’ Holiday, by Thomas Dekker, and the other was Oppenheimer by Tom
Morton-Smith.
The Shoemaker’s Holiday was very well produced and acted,
with David Troughton as the shoemaker who ascends to be Lord Mayor of London,
and a young man called Joel McCormack, who seemed to be pretty fresh out of
drama school, as one of his cheeky and determined journeymen. I shall watch out for him in future.
Oppenheimer is a new play written specially for the RSC, and
we were beginning to wonder if we had made the right choice between that and a
good concert in Nottingham on the same night.
Well, it was brilliant. It set out the technical, logistical,
(do you know that 10% of the total
electricity generated in the U.S. was supplying the Manhattan Project?) and
moral problems of the Manhattan Project so clearly, and the issue of
surveillance, distrust and government control is so deeply relevant today. We
were gripped. John Heffernan as J. Robert Oppenheimer, was wonderful, but there wasn't a weak link in the cast.
I’ve been down to the library and got a biography of
Oppenheimer, which I fear may be like a Brief History of Time; while I was actually
reading it, I understood it perfectly, but as soon as I closed the book, it
sort of slipped away. So I read it again, with exactly the same result.
The play has also provided us
with after school activities with the grandsons, who were fascinated by
exponential mathematics, and how exactly the bomb was built and detonated, and
why there wasn’t a crater at Hiroshima. Some of our google searches may look
dodgy if GCHQ is watching us.
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