Copenhagen revival
The ‘best play ever written about science’ returns
‘Three people on stage talking about physics is not the most obvious material for a popular play.” Michael Frayn is talking about Copenhagen, his 1998 work which is now considered a modern masterpiece – and perhaps the best play about science ever written.
Frayn never expected it to amount to much, and yet from its acclaimed run at the National Theatre it went on to become an unlikely hit, transferring to Broadway and being performed internationally, while also generating a fair amount of controversy.
Now, 20 years on, it is being revived at the Chichester Festival Theatre, directed by Michael Blakemore (who mounted the original) and starring Charles Edwards, Patricia Hodge and Paul Jesson.
Copenhagen focuses on an antagonistic 1941 meeting between two physicists, the Dane Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, a German, at Bohr’s home in Copenhagen. Nuclear fission had been unexpectedly discovered just before the outbreak of the Second World War and both men knew that the energy released by a nuclear chemical reaction could be used to create the most catastrophic weapon in the history of warfare. Bohr was on the side of the Allies, while Heisenberg had stayed in Germany, where he may have been involved in a programme to create the first atom bomb for the Nazis.
Why would Heisenberg have visited Copenhagen, though? That is the question asked in the first line of the play by Margrethe, Bohr’s wife, but is never fully answered. Was he trying to get information about the Allies’ plans? Or trying to pass on information to his old friend about the Germans’ potentially devastating project?
For all of Copenhagen’s talk about uranium atoms and nuclear chain reactions, the play’s success is because of its human investigation, rather than its scientific inquiry. The science writer and physics professor Graham Farmelo agrees: “What this play is really about is whether we can ever know what others are thinking – there is a fundamental uncertainty about the information we have of each other.”
This was illustrated when Frayn met Heisenberg’s son, Jochen, straight after the New York premiere. “Here was this very tall, handsome figure who had just spent two hours watching my version of his father. He said that my version was quite unlike him, that he never expressed emotion about anything except music. But he understood that the characters in a play have to be more forthcoming than that. He put his finger on why we fictionalise characters and write fiction about real events – to bring out connections that happen in life and to suggest things about people’s feelings that never got expressed.”
Frayn, who had no scientific expertise, admits that the physics was sometimes a struggle. “Various mistakes crept in during the writing and scientists would advise me, saying, ‘You should look at this again. You might wish to say molecule rather than atom’. But I was struck by their generosity of tone. At no point, did anyone say, ‘You bloody idiot. Why are you writing about science?’”
However, in New York the tone was sometimes less than generous. When Copenhagen opened at the Royale Theatre in 2000, the debate around the play became much broader and more fundamental. Historian Paul Lawrence Rose, an outspoken critic of
‘Mistakes crept in during the writing and scientists would advise me, saying, “You might wish to say molecule rather than atom”.’
Heisenberg, found in Frayn’s play a “subtle revisionism… more destructive than [David] Irving’s self-evidently ridiculous assertions – more destructive of the integrity of art, of science, and of history.”
This was an extreme case, but many felt that Frayn should have been more direct on the evils of Nazism (Frayn has since said that he didn’t because he assumed that such horrors were already well understood) and that he had been too soft on Heisenberg, whom he saw as a German nationalist rather than a Nazi sympathiser. As Farmelo says: “There should have maybe been more of an indication that Heisenberg supped with a very short spoon with the Nazis.”
How we should perceive the play, and its uncertainties, is certainly complicated by information that has come to light since its premiere. In 2002, the Bohr family released documents that seemed to prove that Heisenberg was making a bomb for the Nazis. In one letter, a direct response to Heisenberg’s denial of the fact but never sent, Bohr wrote: “You spoke in a manner that could only give me the firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons.”
“I wish it had been available when I wrote the play,” says Frayn. “I thought it showed Bohr remained much angrier [about the meeting] than people realised.”
Frayn admits that at the time of the publication of the 2002 letter, he and other commentators missed one crucial point – how Heisenberg neglected to adhere to normal wartime notions of secrecy.
“Whatever he was officially licensed or ordered to do there, I cannot believe that it included revealing the existence of one of the most secret research programmes in Germany – least of all to a half-jewish enemy alien who was known to be in contact with Allied scientists (Bohr was at this point still contributing to the US journal The Physical Review), and also to be under observation because of his hostile attitude to Nazism and his extensive help for its victims.”
There were further revelations. Some time after the release of the Bohr archive, Heisenberg’s family sanctioned the publication of a letter that was written to his wife, Elisabeth, in 1941 when he was in Copenhagen. It confirms something extraordinary, as Frayn explains.
“A lot of people said that Heisenberg never went to the Bohrs’ house because they were so angry with him that they wouldn’t receive him, but in the letter he said that he actually went three times,” says Frayn.
The letter reveals that it was in Heisenberg’s second visit that the conversation had “gone completely wrong” – while in the third, their talk “turned for a great part of the evening around purely human problems. Bohr read something aloud, I played a Mozart sonata (A major).”
This shows the permeability of history – that the argument only took the form we thought it took because of the recollections of both participants years later, no doubt magnified by the realisation of the true scale of Nazi atrocities. Frayn considered rewriting the play but decided that the new evidence wasn’t strong enough to justify it. Rather he has made a few emendations and kept the timescale of the meeting the same (over one night) for the purpose of a clean structure.
In 2018, as the nuclear threat from North Korea among others remains at the forefront of our minds, Copenhagen has acquired a sort of ominous piquancy. “I hope I am wrong but I expect there will be a nuclear confrontation in the foreseeable future,” says Farmelo. “The truth is that the technology exists.”
Meanwhile, what really happened in September 1941 will forever remain a mystery – and that is exactly what will make Copenhagen endure.