The murderous odyssey of Bonnie and Clyde is a tricky subject for a musical because the characters are such loathsome wasters and their grisly ambition is to fleece poor people at gunpoint during the Great Depression. They’re famous for stealing from banks but they changed tack once they realised that grocery stores and funeral parlours were easier to rob. The little guy was their real target. In this revived musical, written in 2009, the principal figures have no redeeming qualities at all. Bonnie is a beautiful brain-dead popsicle who dreams of becoming a poet or a movie star. Nowadays she’d be ranting on TikTok from the front seat of an SUV. Clyde is an amoral thug who shoots dead anyone who comes between him and his greed. His chief aim is to outdo the questionable achievements of Al Capone. The pair killed 13 people during their reign of terror and this gory headcount is announced in the opening scene, which also features the notorious ‘death car’ whose bullet-riddled coachwork is one of the story’s enduring symbols. Since the audience knows the ending before the story gets started, the only source of interest is in the journey itself. And it’s less than thrilling.

The gang’s opponents, the cops who struggled to arrest them, are portrayed as a bunch of swaggering, heartless oafs who bicker among themselves while the criminals roam free across the midwest murdering bank clerks and the odd detective. Much stage time is spent on Clyde’s hapless brother, Buck, who tags along and tries to get the couple to quit crime and settle down in the suburbs. Since we know he fails, his mission is hard to care about. The great Hollywood movie from 1967 overshadows this production whose lead actors, Frances Mayli McCann (Bonnie) and Jordan Luke Gage (Clyde), can’t possibly match the rock-star glamour and charismatic playfulness of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. It’s drab by comparison. The costumes are fine to look at but that reflects the swashbuckling bravura of 1930s stylings. The tunes, by Frank Wildhorn, are pretty decent. As are Don Black’s lyrics. It feels like an effective factory-made musical created by the best brains available. Nick Winston’s direction moves things crisply along. It has a pulse but not a heart.

Farm Hall is the unexciting title of the debut play by Katherine Moar whose work relies on the transcripts of bugged conversations. In the summer of 1945, Germany’s leading nuclear physicists were held under house arrest at Farm Hall, a mansion near Cambridge, where their table talk was recorded by British intelligence. Moar has added some flourishes of her own and she appears to know exactly how cranky middle-aged men speak and interact. The first scene is a theatrical in-joke. The exiled boffins decide to investigate the mysteries of English culture by holding a read-through of a popular wartime comedy, Blithe Spirit. Noël Coward’s absurdist plot and his frivolous dialogue are coldly dissected by the literal-minded scientists who fail to find anything funny in the play.

After this light-hearted opening, a bombshell lands, literally. The boffins learn that the Americans have solved the countless technical challenges of creating an atomic weapon. Hiroshima and Nagasaki lie in ruins. The news is emotionally devastating for Otto Hahn who discovered nuclear fission – he feels like a mass murderer. The other scientists wrangle over the research work of the 1930s which might have delivered Hitler the bomb. Some made blunders or worked inefficiently but these slackers are now transformed into heroes. Their failures may have saved millions of lives. And the boffins whose theories turned out to be correct are forced to contemplate how close they came to handing Hitler the ultimate murder weapon.

Werner Heisenberg, the biggest name in the play, delivers a marvellously oblique speech half-admitting that he pursued erroneous theories because he knew it was morally right to get the science wrong. But it’s only a half-admission. Possibly he’s rehearsing his defence against the accusation that he actively supported Hitler’s quest for a nuke. What he really believes is uncertain. And uncertainty is, of course, Heisenberg’s best known principle. It’s a treat to see a new play that doesn’t revisit the author’s troubled childhood or raise complaints about tough times in urban ghettos. Even better, this is a show with the intellectual self-confidence to use a very limited palette. All we get is a handful of tetchy German brainboxes discussing particle physics and critical mass but the result is a gripping human drama. It might easily have been twice as long. Director Stephen Unwin has matched a tremendous script with a first-rate cast led by Forbes Masson (Hahn) and Alan Cox (Heisenberg). David Yelland plays the aristocratic Von Laue with a care-worn, melancholy grandeur. His sweetly sonorous voice is a tone-poem in itself.