COPENHAGEN
Is there any certainty in life? What are, and what become of our memories of times past? Does time present have any meaning? What is to become of our beloved world? Is science servant or destroyer?
You can’t help asking these fundamental questions after seeing Michael Frayn’s great play which has arrived with a Big Bang at the Arts Theatre. I am not going to beat about the bush; without an atomic particle of doubt, this production is utterly unmissable; cancel all other plans, get a ticket.
Copenhagen – what is it about? Yes, it is sometimes a tough code to break. Frayn audaciously plays with the groundbreaking atomic theories of two of the greatest physicists of the 20th century – Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. The premise is disarmingly simple – why did the German Heisenberg visit Bohr, the half Jewish Dane, in 1941 when Copenhagen had been occupied by the Nazis? Had he come to tell his former mentor and friend something that would shake the very foundations of human civilization? Or not? Frayn’s brilliant drama (in two long but utterly absorbing acts) is as elusive as a quantum particle.
Frayn’s conceit is also simple but cleverly conceived: the long dead trio of Heisenberg, Bohr and his wife Margrethe inhabit a wide, bare stage, a landscape of darkness, to ask a fundamental question.: why did Heisenberg come to Copenhagen in 1941? The characters play with memory and reconstruct (at least three times) Heisenberg’s arrival in Copenhagen at the Bohr’s house. They reminisce, share stories of their scientific arguments and glory days but behind every happy memory, a dark counterweight lurks: the tragic death of Bohr’s son, the expulsion from Nazi Germany of Jewish theoretical physicists and the building of the bomb. The two men now greet each other as warm friends, then as squabbling enemies; anger and compassion collide, understanding eludes like a transient photon. After a while Bohr’s wife acts as referee, defender of her husband, re-setter of the agenda.
The play is far too dense, richly textured and layered to provide a neat synopsis. You just have to be there. There is humour too – especially in Margrethe’s wry commentary on the friendship but also often bitter rivalries between the older guru and young pretender. As someone who typed up most of Bohr’s papers she acts as a very effective, and welcome, lay person helping us to follow the science and the chronologies. She is played with towering strength by the wonderful Haydn Gwynne. Philip Ardittii is outstanding as the deeply troubled Heisenberg and captures perfectly his edgy temper, arrogant self regard suffused with a brittle humanity. Malcolm Sinclair WAS Neils Bohr – I was totally convinced that the great ‘father of modern physics’ was on that stage roaming with dignified presentment beneath a giant circular circumference of light – neutron and electron. The three actors shone providing the distanced audience with a masterclass in seemingly effortless acting technique.
In a play where not very much happens, but everything happens, Emma Howlett’s fluid direction, subtle underscore, gentle revolve and pitch perfect use of the space, meant that one was totally gripped from beginning to end. I also learned a bit about sub-atomic theory but without ever feeling that this was didacticism for its own sake. Lines, often poetic and beautiful in their construct, were delivered with crystal clarity and the production succeeded in that most important of theatrical rules – we cared about the characters. We also cared about the science – the two men haunted by the spectre of their own discoveries that could have led to Hitler having nuclear weapons and Bohr’s contribution to the physics behind Hiroshima.
Heisenberg’s own Uncertainty Principle was given a good airing but one thing was most certainly certain: this is not a play to miss.
Copenhagen continues until Saturday at the Arts Theatre Cambridge
Monday – Saturday, 7.30pm
and Thursday & Saturday, 2.30pm:
£20/£25/£30/£35
All ticket prices include a £3 per-ticket booking fee
Box Office: 01223 503333
www.cambridgeartstheatre.com
