AN Aberystwyth-based theatre company has been nominated in four categories at the Wales Theatre Awards, for a play about war-time codebreaker, Alan Turing.

To Kill A Machine by Catrin Fflur Huws, a lecturer in Law at Aberystwyth University, was brought to the stage by local company, Scriptography Productions.

It was co-produced by Cwmni Theatr Arad Goch in Bath Street, where the play was rehearsed premiered, before touring Wales and visiting the Edinburgh Festival were it achieved unprecedented success for a new play.

It will be heading to the Kings Head Theatre in London for a three week run from 6-23 April and then heading to Dublin for the International Gay Theatre festival before touring again in the autumn.

The Wales Theatre Awards are nominations from critics in Wales and then selected by a panel of judges. The results will be announced at a ceremony at Sherman Cymru in Cardiff on Saturday night (30 January). The play has been nominated for Best Male Performance by Gwydion Rhys who plays Alan Turing, Best Director for Angharad Lee, Best Playwright for Catrin Fflur Huws and Best Production.

Julie McNicholls Vale talked to writer Catrin Fflur Huws and producer Sandra Bendelow about the play’s success.

Catrin, how did you feel when you heard you had been nominated for best playwright?

CFH: Stunned. Absolutely stunned. It hasn’t sunk in yet. I’ve seen so many good plays from Welsh Companies this year, and I’m conscious that there are others that I’ve not been able to see, and for To Kill a Machine to be ranked among the best of them is something very special indeed.

SB: It’s well deserved though. It’s Catrin’s first full-length, but she has achieved something so incredibly special with this play, creating 14 characters, spanning Alan Turing’s life from schoolboy to death, covering his code breaking but focusing on his life and treatment as a gay man in a society which condemned it. She’s written a beautiful love story and a heartbreaking tale of a man’s life being destroyed by society because of who he loved and on top of that embedded a game show sequence into it which explores his artificial intelligence work which thrills computer scientists.

Also it’s historically accurate whilst being completely contemporary. That is quite an achievement.

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