Oppenheimer, Vaudeville Theatre, London - review

Tom Morton-Smith, the author of this impressive play about the so-called father of the atomic bomb, defines J Robert Oppenheimer's story as epic: "Shakespearean in its rise and fall". If anything, though, it's even more chilling: none of Shakespeare's tragic protagonists left, as Morton-Smith's Oppenheimer says, "a loaded gun in the playground". In telling his story, the playwright is in essence tracing the path by which the human race arrived at the ability to annihilate itself. He responds to the challenge with a restless, intelligent and ultimately desolate drama, delivered in Angus Jackson's RSC production with fizzing energy.

The evening starts crisply, with Oppenheimer addressing the audience as students at one of his lectures in theoretical physics: "I expect you to be attentive," says John Heffernan with mock sternness. The mood is light-hearted. It's 1934, he's a professor at Berkeley, the play darts back and forth between a boozy fundraising party for Spanish Republicans and the university department where the chalk flies as Oppenheimer and his brilliant colleagues work out the implications of nuclear fission. Once their energy has been harnessed to the Manhattan Project, however, the atmosphere changes. Heffernan's Oppenheimer, both compelled and repelled by the invention, argues that someone will deliver the bomb, now the knowledge is out - better us than them.

Heffernan's performance is superb: affable and charismatic yet slightly aloof, as the play wears on he retreats further into his core, his stare increasingly distant. Around him spin scientists, friends, families and women - some of whom become casualties as his priorities split and clash.

There are a few duff scenes: an exchange designed to explain Oppenheimer's steely strength, for example. And the action is so busy that we don't get close enough to the man himself, while some characterisation is sketchy. But Jackson's excellent ensemble brings the era to life, with Thomasin Rand and Catherine Steadman particularly strong as Oppenheimer's increasingly fragile wife and lover respectively, and Jamie Wilkes impressive as his colleague Bob Serber. And as the play keeps shifting, balancing hindsight with period perspective, it offers a sobering and resonant message about the inevitability of partial understanding.

To May 23, rsc.org.uk

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