Turing was feted in establishment circles land was an especial favourlte of Churchill), but not for long. For he also broke other codes which, to the upper middle classes into which he was born in 1912 were just as important. He was honest, openly atheist and a homosexual. For these crimes he was hounded by Mi5 as a security risk after the war and eventually driven to suicide in 1954 two years after the court case in which he was charged as a homosexual
The play deals very movingly with the personal tragedy of a young man educated in the free-thinking Cambridge of the 1930s and utterly incapable of comprehending the narrow-minded attitudes emerging in post-war Britain. At one point he expresses the tear that the notion of free will might all be a myth but feels he has no choice but to act as if it did exist. He explains that his passion for mathematics (developed in early childhood when he found numbers of great 'comfort) stemmed from its change since Einstein's work: now there were no longer right and wrong answers, as we are usually taught, but unending possibilities - in particular possibilities for building a machine that could think - the modern computer.
In a truly excellent performance as Turing Derek Jacobi portrays a man who 40 could not lie and was totally lacking in
Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing any of the social graces demanded by his paperbacks. class. And to the extent that at a time when homosexuality was totally illegal, he freely admits his sexuality to the police and is shocked and outraged that such self expression should cause offence or be against the law.
In the play Turning is portrayed above all as a lonely figure, condemned, despite his brilliance and hidden from history despite his inventions. It is a powerful blow struck against bigotry at this time of renewed homosexual phobia and a timely reminder of what it was like before homosexuals were given the minimum protection of the 1967 legislation
But the general political context in which Turing's fate was sealed is more accurately set in the biogaphy upon which the play is based called Alan Turing - The enigma of intelligence by Andrew Hodges, himself an activist in the gay movement, and published by Unwin
Here we see how US sources, in the context of the cold war and in the run-up to the intervention in Vietnam began to put pressure on MI5 to tighten up security Turing had toured the US during the war and contributed to the development of new intelligence techniques there. Interestingly enough this was also the time of a huge anti-gay campaign in the United States.
MIS in turn put pressure on the Manchester (where Turing was based at the university) police to keep an eye on Turing and he was eventually charged with homosexuality and kept under close surveillance.
Both the play and the biography show very powerfully just how far the establishment is prepared to go to persecute someone who does not conform, whether that be socially, politically or morally and how this is done with particular venom when that someone is 'one of their own' •
International No 8 January/February 1987