REVIEW: Oppenheimer – at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from Monday, January 19 to Saturday, March 7, 2015.

ONE particular sentence sticks in the mind from this play. It’s when Oppenheimer himself declares: “I fear I may have left a loaded gun in the playground.”

Regarded as the father of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer – in Tom Morton-Smith’s cleverly constructed and illuminating play, clearly has some concerns about what he and a team of scientists had created.... a weapon with horrendous capabilities to reduce humans, animals, woodland and towns to ash and dust!

In the wrong hands the product of their brains, the deadly bomb which thankfully helped bring the Second World War to an end in the Far East, could be the human race’s apocalypse.

So it was by some strange coincidence, on the night of the press showing, the famous Doomsday Clock was in the news.

Created in 1947, not that long after Japan’s surrender in the wake of the cataclysmic Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, this symbolic clock – according to an announcement by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – had moved to three minutes to midnight, two minutes closer than when it last changed in 2012.

The ‘Bulletin group’ was formed by the scientists who had worked on the American’s top secret Manhattan Project in the early 1940s in response to fears fuelled by what German scientists were attempting to discover.

Apparently we haven’t been this close to Armageddon since 1953 when the USA and USSR were eyeballing each other with their atomic bombs in the days of the Cold War.

It claims the clock’s move in the wrong direction has come about because of ‘unchecked’ climate change and the growing threat of a nuclear arms race resulting from the modernisation of huge arsenals.

You can see how that comment from Oppenheimer might resonate with many.

This play delves into a major, if not momentous moment in modern world history, and is hugely absorbing in itself and so too is Oppenheimer as America’s top brass swings into action in this stunning re-enactment. Not only do events of recent decades unfold, so too do a myriad of thought-provoking moments in this gripping offering.

John Heffernan is first class as Oppenheimer – playing him with great style and ease. He splendidly offers for examination the tortured soul of a man with the capability of unleashing horror on the world, yet having the warmth of someone at ease with the opposite sex, as well as his colleagues, whilst there is also a considerable ego bouncing around on the edge.

The play’s love interest is splendidly portrayed by Thomasin Rand, as his troubled wife Kitty, and Catherine Steadman, as ‘the other woman’ in his life, Jean Tatlock.

Kitty is a considerable mixture – presented as a man-chaser yet reluctant mother, but Rand ensures there is a degree of concern for her as nerves teeter on the edge as lips long for the comfort she finds in alcohol.

The production is sprinkled with other fine performances as director Angus Jackson ensures it trips along at a nice steady pace as other issues of the day are partially explored – ethics on the use of the bomb, military dogma and security concerns – just look at the level of surveillance today, the tendency of some Americans to lean towards ‘Red’ in politics, and split-loyalties as well as split atoms.

There have already been dramas this year about the torment, the anguish suffered by some of the world’s great scientists. Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking’s stories have been warmly received on the big screen and now, although the subject has been visited in various guises before, playwright Morton-Smith’s fresh offering on Oppenheimer also deserves huge accolades.

So who might be up next? Maybe Einstein, or perhaps Edwin Hubble, or a little further back to Michael Faraday – there are so many to go for. While it’s in vogue might anyone else fancy chancing their arm...? Pass the pen please.

If it’s going to be written and acted in a similarly immaculate vein it might be advisable to begin booking now.

However, it’s highly doubtful any new story could throw up a scientist who has ‘left a loaded gun in the playground’ and that statement continues to provide considerable food for thought right up to this day and into the future.