Last Christmas Eve, Turing was awarded a posthumous royal pardon overturning his 1952 conviction for gross indecency. "Each episode goes to the very centre of what's going on … it's not just alluding to it or inspired by it."Īfter finishing the piece together, however, events changed its shape. "It's very direct," he says of the final work's lyrical style. Hodges – a lifelong Pet Shop Boys fan and gay rights campaigner – was delighted. Falling in love with Hodges' poetic prose, Tennant emailed the author in late 2012, asking him to help choose passages for the libretto that would best tell Turing's story. The band's interest in Turing returned after Lowe watched a 2011 Channel 4 documentary on the polymath, prompting Tennant to read Andrew Hodges's biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma and the pair to start composing A Man for the Future. Essentially, we've all caught up with Alan Turing." Also homosexuality between men was only legal in private over the age of 21 – and of course that situation has changed. Fifteen to 20 years later, everyone had one. "Back then, I knew nobody who owned a computer. In the 80s, though, Turing's story resonated differently. made a big impression on people that knew him, because he was such an unusual person … coming from this different era of V-neck sweaters and sports jackets, yet having this incredible vision of the Universal Machine, and going round telling people he was homosexual."
Tennant explains that they first heard of Alan Turing in the mid-80s after seeing Hugh Whitemore's West End play Breaking the Code: "You really get a feeling of this extraordinary quirky genius when you learn about Turing.
This project is not out of character, given the Pet Shop Boys' recent career: they have also written a film soundtrack, ballet score, musical and children's play in the last 15 years. It takes in Turing's Dorset childhood, the paper that laid down his theories for the modern computer, his second world war success at Bletchley Park, his conviction for gross indecency in 1952 (after innocently telling a police officer about his homosexuality), his opting for chemical castration over imprisonment, his depression and eventual suicide. Alan Turing, mathematician who helped crack German codes during the second world war.
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