THE KID WAS A SPY
Created by jem rolls
Produced by jem rolls / big word / Finchampstead, UK
Reviewed by Barbara Popel
59 min / 14+ / Storytelling, History
At 18 years old, if you had believed you could save the world from destruction BUT it required you to betray your country, would you have done it?
Ted Hall did. The youngest physicist working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. He was working on the plutonium implosion mechanism — the one in the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki that killed 70,000 people. He led the team working on this mechanism when he and Savvy Sax, a flakey Harvard University chum, decided to pass documents describing the bomb to the Russians. They wanted to destroy the US’s monopoly on this uber-destructive weapon. They reasoned that if two countries had it, neither would use it.
Jem Rolls in THE KID WAS A SPY. Photo by Vikram Ram.
Jem Rolls’ riveting well-researched monologue is Ted Hall’s story. On opening night, his audience was totally engaged – Rolls is a great storyteller.
Hall delighted in the glorious science being done in Los Alamos but was appalled at the idea of the US dominating the post-war world — perhaps becoming a fascist state. Hall had no idea of Stalin’s vicious crimes in the USSR — the manufactured starvation in Ukraine, the gulags, the fearful oppression. We were shocked by the clumsy way he handed over the top secret documents. We heard why Hall ceased spying for the Russians. And we learned why Hall entirely escaped prosecution and ended up doing biophysics research at Cambridge University. But the other Russian spies — Klaus Fuchs, David Greenberg, the Rosenbergs and others – were arrested, tried and, in the case of the Rosenbergs, executed.
At the end of this fascinating history lesson, Rolls asked the audience, “Do you think Ted Hall did the right thing by giving the bomb to the Russians?” A tough question to answer after hearing the story THE KID WAS A SPY.
THE KID WAS A SPY is playing at Venue 2 – ODD Box (2nd floor, Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue) until Sunday June 23, 2024. Tickets are $14 plus service fees online, at the Fringe box office (3rd floor, Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue), and at the two satellite box offices (LabO in the Ottawa Art Gallery and La Nouvelle Scene). 5 and 10 Show Passes are also available. Visit Ottawa Fringe Fest’s website for the show’s schedule and check out for the Fringe online schedule.
