Copenhagen

Figure 1.

Matthew Marsh as Werner Heisenberg and David Burke as Niels Bohr in the Royal National Theatre’s production of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, directed by Michael Blakemore. Photo: Conrad Blakemore.

Michael Frayn’s new play Copenhagen explores the puzzling trip German physicist Werner Heisenberg took to Copenhagen in 1941 to see his Danish counterpart Niels Bohr. That the meeting of these two old friends took place is historical fact, but what they said to each other is not, despite the best efforts of colleagues and British intelligence to find out during and after the war. Why did the German physicist, who was not a Nazi even though he worked on atomic energy research for his government, go to see Bohr, his half-Jewish friend and mentor then on the opposite side and working in occupied Denmark? The Gestapo was watching both men. Whatever they said to each other made Bohr deeply angry. He later gave one version of their meeting, Heisenberg another, further clouding matters.

How does one get an audience interested in such questions, and even heighten their involvement while having three characters discuss atomic physics? This problem was solved admirably by Frayn’s eminently playable script and by director Michael Blakemore and his cast, creating a riveting and theatrically intense production in this première of the play at the Royal National’s Cottesloe Theatre. The play works because Frayn is a competent dramatist who is able to keep his own voice from intruding upon that of his characters. They are each complete, independent creations and believable agents of the play’s events. Although Frayn is best known for his comic writings, Copenhagen should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with such works as Benefactors, Here, or the novel A Landing on the Sun.

Frayn’s beautifully crafted play is not about the ethics of developing the atomic bomb, although it could be read that way. More fundamentally, the play concerns motivations for human actions and the uncertainty of even individuals knowing why they do what they do. As he said in a “Dialogue” presentation with Blakemore at the National Theatre on 1 June, “I thought what was said in 1941 might have some relation to uncertainty, at least in the theoretical limits on what we can know about human thought.” Characteristically, Frayn does not solve the puzzle for the audience. He merely explores the situation in several permutations. The play is, in a way, a philosophical construction of another human attempt to make order and sense out of the world in which we find ourselves. Frayn’s Cambridge degree is in moral sciences, now known as philosophy, and he has frequently said that all his plays have a philosophical basis to them.

The theatrical device framing the action is that, now dead, all three characters, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Bohr’s wife Margarethe, have gathered one more time to determine just what happened and why. Copenhagen explores the multiple memories and versions of what may have actually happened, much as his Benefactors examines the manifold aspects of benefaction. As in the earlier play, here Frayn frequently has his characters address the audience directly from their post-life presence, setting the stage for us as they move to their several re-enactments of the 1941 meeting, like variations on a theme. This technique is always made to seem perfectly natural in both Frayn’s writing and the actors’ portrayals.

Peter J. Davison’s design is appropriately simple. He provides an arena setting at the center of which a large white circle with markings suggests a flattened and abstracted globe of the earth. At the rear is a steeply raised bank of four rows of seats, looking like either a lecture hall or an operating theatre. The sole entrance to the stage area, which thrusts into the globe design by means of a pointed wedge painted on the floor, bisects the bank. Three dark aluminum chairs, ironically designed for use on the Hindenburg dirigible, are the only other...