Theatre: Copenhagen
Minerva, Chichester Festival Theatre, West Sussex (01243-781312). Until 22 September Running time: 2hrs 30mins
Michael Frayn’s modern classic, now enjoying a Chichester revival, draws “thrilling” drama from the unlikeliest of subjects, said Bella Todd in The Stage: nuclear physics and the visit paid by the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1941 to his Danish mentor, Niels Bohr. Heisenberg, who meets Bohr in Nazi-occupied Denmark, was at work on Germany’s efforts to develop an atomic bomb, which never came to fruition. Bohr would soon work on the Allies’ Manhattan Project, which did. Directed by Michael Blakemore, a frequent Frayn collaborator who also helmed the much-garlanded original production in 1998, this revival – like the secrets of nuclear fission during the Second World War – “couldn’t be in safer hands”.
Frayn’s master stroke, said Libby Purves in the Daily Mail, is to have his ghostly figures look back and offer three competing versions of what took place that visit. Did Germany fail to make the atom bomb on account of Heisenberg’s “moral scruples”? Or was it because he made an error in one of the key calculations? Frayn, of course, cannot answer that, but he can (and does) give us a great play “neat in physics metaphors, profound in ethical philosophy, sharp and sometimes funny in its human insight”. It’s moving, too. When the characters “at last stand in the circle of dimming light, you shed a tear” – for them and for humanity.
Blakemore’s production “bubbles with tension”, said Maxwell Cooter on What’s On Stage – the two great physicists circle the stage “like electrons around a nucleus, occasionally making an intellectual leap to another quantum level”. Charles Edwards as Heisenberg and Paul Jesson as Bohr are excellent as the sparring scientists, while Patricia Hodge is compellingly spiky as Bohr’s wife. The pity, said Sam Marlowe in The Times, is that 20 years on, Copenhagen no longer “feels audacious” – in part because its success inspired so many other plays about “difficult science”. And Blakemore’s “lucid” staging feels too familiar: a radically fresh approach might have proved more rewarding. That said, this is still an intensely stimulating revival of a “fascinating play”.