Any physicist whose ideas led to the possibility of nuclear war might expect to be the subject of a biographies – and J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67) has left a hefty shelf of those. But the American scientist has also been the subject of less likely tributes: an asteroid bears his name (Oppenheimer 67085) and his life has been dramatised in a BBC drama series, a German play by Heinar Kipphardt (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer), a Swiss satire (Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists) and John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic.Oppenheimer’s biographical after-shock now spreads to an English play, now in the London West End after an acclaimed RSC premiere at Stratford. In Oppenheimer, dramatist Tom Morton-Smith focuses, like Adams, on the approach moment that def