Farm Hall at Richmond Theatre

“It was never about the Reich or the war. It was about physics.”

Based on a remarkable true story. Summer 1945, Hitler is dead, but the war in the Pacific rages on.

When six of Germany’s top nuclear scientists – including three Nobel Prize winners – are detained by the Allied forces at Farm Hall, a country house in the Cambridge countryside, they find themselves shut off from the outside world. Their entertainment? Some redacted newspaper, a broken piano and a copy of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. But as the months go by, their attention turns to the ongoing war and thoughts of their broken homeland.

The scientists’ tranquil summer is shattered by the inconceivable news that the Americans have succeeded where the Germans have failed, that the United States has not only built an atomic bomb, but has used one against Japan…

Unbeknownst to the scientists, during their stay, every inch of Farm Hall was bugged and their every action recorded. This play is inspired by the true events that took place at Farm Hall between July 1945 and January 1946.

The cast is a line-up of the crème of British actors with Forbes Masson, Daniel Boyd, Alan Cox, Julius D’Silva, William Chubb and George Jones. Under the guiding hand of director Stephen Unwin, previously the Artistic Director of English Touring Theatre and the Rose Theatre, Kingston, this production comes from London’s award-winning Jermyn Street Theatre.