That Is All You Need to Know

That Is All You Need to Know
Idle Motion at Norwich Playhouse

Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 30 September 2014

With strong visual staging, young theatre group Idle Motion brought a tribute to the secrets of the wartime Code and Cipher unit at Bletchley Park to Norwich.

Using physicality, clever projections to move events and multiroling, the cast explored the significance of the ground-breaking thinking which helped end the war.

That Is All You Need to Know summed up the philosophy that ‘careless talk costs lives’ which stayed with many Bletchley workers for decades after. In our instant click-and-share world that seems astonishing.

The considered and thoughtful piece told the story in Brecht-influenced docu-drama style of how code-breaking teams were put together, including Gordon Welchman whose book was later frowned upon by the security world and tragic genius Alan Turing, now acknowledged as the father of modern computer science.

That tale was juxtaposed with how the decaying buildings were saved for the nation in the 1990s in a neat closing of the circular lesson in life that in order to move forward, we first must look back.