Peter J. Davison’s set design for Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, is a study in simplicity; cream-colored tiles clustered in a smooth circle that is surrounded by black tiles. The contrasts, like the nucleus of an atom surrounded by blank space, are the appropriate launching point for a story of ambiguity amidst disparity. Frayn’s play Copenhagen winner of three 2000 Tony Awards and best play honors from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle and The Drama League, is a work, that, coming from a playwright famous for such comedies as “Noises Off,” or translating Tolstoy, has certainly surprised many in the theatre community and won international fame and acclaim. But is it as strong as some perceive?
The basic story of Copenhagen, seems relatively simple on the outside. A couple in their late middle age is expecting the visit of an old student, who was both the man’s creative partner and surrogate son. Both the young man and the couple are anticipatory; it has been a long time for all of them. But this outline does not do the story justice; the time is 1941, the old couple is esteemed physicist Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe, they are Jews in a Nazi-occupied Denmark. The young man is Werner Heisenburg, another brilliant scientist and one of the heads of the German nuclear division. A seemly simple situation is now taut with tension – the two men once loved each other as father and son, but now are on opposite sides of a very bitter war. Heisenburg is not a Nazi; he finds their crimes and philosophy atrocious, but he loves and is willing to protect his homeland. It is at first a strange dinner party, but early tensions are soon lost to old affections, and, fearing possible surveillance from the SS, the two men agree to take one of their traditional “walks,” a shared time of exercise and philosophy. However, Bohr returns home soon, shaking with anger, and Heisenburg leaves quickly, and the pair will not to see each other again until after the close of the war.
The story of Copenhagen takes place in a sort of dreamland time, where the ghosts of the three people – Bohr, Margrethe, and Heisenburg – by acting out the scene of the dinner and subsequent argument many times, try to put together from their clouded memories exactly what happened that night – why exactly did Heisenburg come to Copenhagen? There are many theories on why Heisenburg came to Copenhagen, in many tones of heroism and villainy – did Heisenburg want to wrestle the secret of the nuclear bomb from Bohr? Was Heisenburg secretly working against Germany from the inside? Was he warning his half Jewish friends to flee the Nazi Holocaust?
Copenhagen is a brilliant play in many ways, but perhaps its strength lies in its use of layered metaphor. The scientific principles of quantum physics that Bohr and Heisenburg worked on made them famous; Bohr won the Noble Prize for his quantum model of the atom, and Heisenburg received the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum theory and creating the Uncertainty Principle. These scientific ideas are used to parallel Heisenburg’s motives for visiting Bohr, like an electron that it is hit by a photon to discern its location, but once the electron has been found, it has been moved by the photon of its discovery, and so the act of finding it exists in paradox. The actors traverse the stage, on the creamy circle within the black, circling, colliding physically and verbally, and discussing physics, memories and lost motivations.
Ultimately, Frayn’s play cannot reveal exactly what Heisenburg wanted from Bohr, as this is as impossible as the Uncertainty Principle itself, but in the end he manages to explain and paint all three characters in a human light. Heisenburg may have prevented the Nazis from developing an atomic bomb, yet he created a German nuclear reactor, while Bohr’s anti-Nazi contributions to the Manhattan Project led to the death of millions of innocent Japanese civilians. Copenhagen, is an excellent study in the true indistinctness of human morals.
So was Copenhagen, worth all of its hype? It was composed of exceptional layers of interconnecting symbols and metaphors, fabulously acted by William Cain as Bohr, Sean Arbuckle as Heisenburg and Tanny McDonald as Margrethe, the sphinx who eventually loses her cool. The play is also surprisingly funny as well as beautifully dramatic.
Fellow theatergoer Molly Sutter offers these remarks: “I was very impressed with Copenhagen. Whenever a show comes in with a very small cast and that simplistic of a set, there is always a heightened chance that the audience will be disengaged and disinterested, but I thought that the actors really did a great job on keeping the focus on their character development as the story is told. The audience often laughed and I think it was pretty clear that they were really into it. What I found so intriguing about this play is that although there’s a lot of physics involved, it wasn’t hard to understand. The themes were incredibly thought provoking, and I think are still especially relevant today, as the U.S. is still fighting the “bad guy” (but now it’s terrorists and not Nazis) and not really paying attention to the human consequences.”
Often few productions are worth their hype, happily, Copenhagen, was as pleasingly complex as the atom itself.