The full cast has been announced for a major new revival of Hugh Whitemore’s “Breaking the Code“, which will tour the UK this autumn in a fresh staging that revisits Alan Turing’s extraordinary life and lasting legacy through a contemporary lens.
Led by Mark Edel-Hunt (Leopoldstadt) as Turing, the production opens at Royal & Derngate, Northampton on 16 September 2025, before visiting Barnstaple, Oxford, Peterborough, Liverpool and Manchester, with a run at Oxford Playhouse scheduled from 7 to 11 October.
Turing’s story is a complex legacy of wartime heroism and personal persecution, which unfolds in Whitemore’s acclaimed drama, based on Andrew Hodges’ biography “Alan Turing: The Enigma“. It traces his groundbreaking work in mathematics and cryptography, his pivotal role in cracking the Nazi Enigma code, and the injustice he endured for being a gay man in mid-20th-century Britain.
In a significant development, this revival will incorporate new material for the first time since its original staging. Notably, acclaimed writer and director Neil Bartlett has contributed a new epilogue reflecting on Turing’s posthumous Royal pardon in 2013 and the subsequent creation of Turing’s Law, which overturned historic convictions of men prosecuted under outdated legislation.
Joining Edel-Hunt are Niall Costigan (The Railway Children) as Mick Ross, Joseph Edwards (The Red Shoes) as Christopher Morcom and a Sixth-Former, Peter Hamilton Dyer (The Promise) as Dillwyn Knox, Carla Harrison-Hodge (Cyrano de Bergerac) as Pat Green, Susie Trayling (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) as Sara Turing/Smith, and Joe Usher (Falkland Sound) as Ron Miller and Nikos.
The production is directed by Jesse Jones (Education, Education, Education) as part of the Made in Northampton season. Design comes from Jonathan Fensom (The Two Popes), with lighting by Johanna Town and sound design and original composition by Robin Colyer. Gerrard Martin joins as movement director, alongside casting director Hannah Miller and voice and dialect coach Gemma Boaden.
While Alan Turing is often remembered for his contributions to computing and military intelligence, “Breaking the Code” returns focus to the man behind the myth — a scientist driven by logic, a thinker punished for his truth, and a figure whose story still echoes in debates about justice, privacy, identity and human rights today.
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