A musical homage to the father of computer science Alan Turing has delighted gay campaigners but disappointed as an artistic experience.
The much-anticipated new opera ‘A man from the future‘ takes the theme of Turing’s homosexuality as the main narrative in a libretto written by the author of the 1984 biography ‘Alan Turing-the Enigma‘ Dr Andrew Hodges, a Reader in Mathematics and Dean of Wadham College Oxford.
Turing, who is credited as being a major force in winning World War 2 for the Allies by cracking the Nazis’ Enigma Code and with inventing computer science and Artificial Intelligence, is defined in this new musical work mainly by his sexuality. He was openly gay at a time when male homosexual acts were illegal (the law did not include lesbians since it was drafted in Victorian times and Queen Victoria did not believe that women would do such things).
Arrested at his home in Wilmslow near Manchester after spending the night with a 19 year old builder, Arnold Murray, Turing admitted the offence and was sentenced to ‘chemical castration’ – a course of female hormone treatment designed to crush his libido. He died of cyanide poisoning on 7.6.54 with the inquest recording a verdict of suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.
Composed by the pop duo The Pet Shop Boys and performed by Juliet Stevenson and the BBC Singers joined by Neil Tennant for the performance, the piece includes the voice of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who made an official apology for the treatment Turing endured when he was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in the UK. It ends with the text of the Royal Pardon granted him posthumously by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Ed Goater, a tenor with the BBC Singers, told Future Intelligence it was a pleasure to work with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. He describes the role of the singers as ‘Sometimes telling the story in words and sometimes adding emotion or conveying a machine-like quality to the sound.’ Goater says the opera is a tragedy but offers redemption at the end, showing that a grateful nation forgave him for a crime that now no longer exists since homosexuality was legalised in 1967 and civil partnership and same-sex marriage are now permitted across the UK.
Electronic synthesisers and computer software are crucial to the overall sound and as such this is a fitting tribute to Turing, without whose theoretical genius and practical machine-building skills there would be no computers. Layered within the music mix are the sound of Morse code and machine noise, referencing Turing’s work at the secret listening post Bletchley Park, the Hertfordshire mansion where teams of codebreakers worked round the clock in wooden huts throughout the second world war, deciphering messages from Hitler’s commanders to his Luftwaffe bombers and U-boat captains as they attacked British cities and merchant ships. The score, composed by Tennant and Lowe is – in the words of BBC Singer Ed Goater “Quintessentially Pet Shop Boys, reminiscent of their 1993 album’ Very’.
Electro-pop fans, gay rights campaigners and admirers of Turing’s work packed the Royal Albert Hall which seats more than five thousand people and also included for this Promenade concert standing room for 1,400 more who joined the audience on the night, paying just five pounds each in the BBC tradition of bringing world-class music to the masses through the Proms. “Stunning” “Remarkable” and “totes amaze” are the reactions on Twitter from some of the fans.
The music is as innovative and engaging as any of the Pet Shop Boys’s earlier work. However the leaden libretto – which is read rather than sung by actress Juliet Stevenson – slows the pace and tells the Alan Turing life story in too many words, skims over the highly technical nature of his work and dwells on his sexuality, and plants it as a central theme of his life starting with an adolescent relationship beginning with a science book he enjoyed at the age of 10 and ending with the 2013 Royal Pardon.
Future Intelligence editor Peter Warren comments: “The Pet Shop Boys work has always had a whiff of the scandalous, the hidden and the clandestine about it. Unfortunately this has lost that edge and sounds purged, sanctified and portentous.”
Peter Warren is the narrator of a radio documentary on the life of Alan Turing ‘”Testing Turing” broadcast on Resonance FM in London and including interviews with the biographer Andrew Hodges, the librettist of ‘A man from the future’ as well as Sir Dermot Turing, Alan’s nephew and the Bletchley Park historian Joel Greenberg. https://soundcloud.com/search?q=Testing%20Turing
The documentary marked the sixtieth anniversary of his death and the occasion when the Turing Test was passed.
Turing designed to distinguish whether a conversation with a computer is generated by a human or an artificial intelligence. and called it ‘The Imitation Game’.It gives its title to the latest artistic tribute to Turing – a Hollywood movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, scheduled for release in October 2014. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing as ‘an irascible genius’ and biographer Andrew Hodges has already condemned the movie as ‘inaccurate’ since it gives a large part to Knightley as the Bletchley Park colleague, Joan, who was briefly engaged to be married to Alan Turing.
Hodges, a stalwart veteran campaigner for gay rights, seems determined to claim the soul of Alan Turing for the movement. But so little of his science, his mathematical genius and engineering expertise appears in ‘A man from the future‘ that the man himself may well be squirming in his grave.
Review by Jane Whyatt 23.7.2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5CjKEFb-sM
