Oppenheimer

One often talks about brands. In the theatre the brand is often a particular actor or actress. Or it could be the theatre - for some people that might mean the Donmar, and for me its Hampstead Theatre. Even if one knows nothing about the play or the cast, you just know from experience that plays there are more likely than not to be enjoyable.

For Oppenheimer the brand was undoubtedly that it was a RSC production. I didn't recognise any of the (typically RSC) huge cast, and the subject matter - the inventor of the nuclear bomb, Robert Oppenheimer - is probably not enough to bring people in. So it was the RSC trademark which largely attracted me, and it was very good. It cleverly brought in little bits of nuclear physics - probably not the easiest subject matter for a theatrical performance.

It worked by being effortlessly clever, both in script and staging. Scenes rapidly changed before your eyes, characters drifting in and out seamlessly. It was very much plot driven rather than character driven. The story of how this academic took on the task of developing the bomb, the uneasy marriage of scientists with a suspicious military and the left-wing sympathies of many of Oppenheimer's associates, and an unsatisfactory love-life, were all told very well. The one weakness, and probably inevitable to gallop through the story, is that one never felt one had got into any of the characters. This wasn't in depth character analysis - the speeches all too short. As I say it was story more than a biography.