Science and Culture: Oppenheimer goes center stage.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, ambitious leader of the Manhattan Project, struggled with intense ethical dilemmas. To continue to work on the atom bomb, he had to abandon his communist friends in order to prove to military monitors his loyalty to the US government. Later, Oppenheimer faced the moral implications of the project’s success. His struggles with ambition, betrayal, and moral quandaries made Oppenheimer positively Shakespearean, says playwright Tom Morton-Smith. It’s fitting, then, that Morton-Smith’sOppenheimer was developed and staged at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, the Bard’s hometown. The play, which follows the physicist from academia in Berkeley, California, to the Los Alamos, New Mexico military facility where the bomb was born, ran January 22 to March 7, 2015. Despite the title, the play’s scope goes beyond one man, as it explores the moral quandaries that multiple scientists faced as they built the ultimate weapon. Morton-Smith is not the first to portray nuclear physicists on stage. Michael Frayn’s Tony award-winning Copenhagen, which debuted in 1998, depicted a fictional meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the titular city. Science can, of course, be complex and difficult to explain concisely, but the tools of the stage can help. In Copenhagen, the actor playing Heisenberg acts out the part of a photon, while Bohr and his wife Margrethe take on an electron and the nucleus, respectively. Oppenheimer’s cast, in a nod to their Shakespearean theater surroundings, use asides or direct address to explain nuclear physics to the audience. To get Oppenheimer’s science spot-on, the show’s director, Angus Jackson, recruited his former University of Oxford physics professor, Dave Wark. Armed with 41 densely worded PowerPoint slides, Wark visited the theater for