Get your own Free HomepageJennifer Ehle
Pat Green
Jennifer Ehle's theatre work includes Tartuffe for the Peter Hall Company at the Playhouse Theatre and 1959 Pink Thunderbird at the Edinburgh Festival. On television she has appeared in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and most recently as Calypso in The Camomile Lawn (directed by Sir Peter Hall). Radio work includes Anniversary and Keystone.
by Wendy Holden
from the Daily Telegraph, 7/4/92
A revival of the play about the man who helped to break the Nazis' wartime Enigma codes opens in Sheffield next week, with Derek Jacobi and Jennifer Ehle.
Breaking the Code, by Hugh Whitemore, which opens at the Lyceum on Tuesday, focuses on the life of Alan Turing, a mathematician who, in his 20s, created the theoretical basis for the digital computer. It will have a two week run at the Richmond Theatre in August.
Jacobi plays the homosexual atheist Turing, the role he took in the original 1986 West End production. Miss Ehle plays his assistant, Pat Green.
by Michael Arditti
from the Evening Standard, 8/25/97
Recently the nation mourned the death of Leonard Cheshire, a legendary hero in battle. Alan Turing, the subject of Hugh Whitemore's new play, was an equal hero, albeit at Bletchley Park, and one whom Churchill himself claimed did more than any other to secure victory.
But, when he committed suicide in 1954, the response was more muted. For the difference between them extended far beyond their fields of combat: whereas Cheshire had a famously and happy marriage; Turing was homosexual.
Turing's triumph lay in breaking the German Enigma code; his downfall lay in breaking the British moral one. His taste, like his friend Wittgenstein's, for "rough trade" offended the status quo.
But Whitemore shows that it's impossible to define him as a scientific genius with a character flaw; his sexuality was integral to the cast of his mind. Indeed, his interest in mental processes was prompted by the death of his boyhood love (goldenly played by David Monteath).
Prissy, petulant, bashful yet boastful: Derek Jacobi, reprising the role of Turing after six years, builds the character largely from negatives; yet he also possesses immense intellectual fire. A man who considers a mathematical theorem "the most beautiful thing I know" is ideally suited to his strengths as an actor; for the one weapon missing from his formidable armoury is animal magnetism.
The play is soon to be filmed and its structure is appropriately cinematic, with a succession of short scenes which director Clifford Williams moves fluently; but his semi-symbolic set is hideous and lacks any sense of time or place.
Rachel Gurney and Jennifer Ehle provide two perfect portraits of middle-class Englishwomen; and there is fine support from Nicholas Shelby, Dave Hill and Paul Slack.
Turing asserts that one moment of passion might be worth more than 20 years of uneventful companionship; and it's good that he finds his in the arms of Mario Kalli's muscular Nikos. But, ultimately, the forces ranged against him are too strong, and after arrest, exposure and brutal hormone treatment, he commits suicide, choosing a method from his favourite film, Snow White.
While by no means a perfect play, it does present a vital message: there are no rigid laws in either mathematics or morality.
Codes must be broken and complexities acknowledged. The validity of love lies not in what we do with our genitals, but what we feel in our hearts.
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