The atomic test of genuine friendship
THE excitement of scientists transcends borders and forges passionate alliances and gratitudes. But how can it, when a devastating new power hovers at the edge of human understanding, and warring nations might use it?
In the Twenties and Thirties, nuclear science was roaring ahead: physicists across Europe met at conferences, talked, argued, teased out discoveries about energy and light and waves and particles, rejoiced in the new alchemy.
Then came Hitler’s war: hard to be a friend across hostile borders, tantalising to wonder what progress old colleagues are making.
Michael Frayn’s wonderful, tense, humane play is about two such friends. The German Werner Heisenberg was Jewish, but still tolerated as a valuable asset, unlike others ( such as Albert Einstein) who fled or died under the boorish Nazi rejection of ‘Jewish science’.
But in 1941 Heisenberg visited old friend Niels Bohr and his wife in Copenhagen. Nobody knows why. But both were working on nuclear fission, the key to what became the horror of Hiroshima.
In a bare circle of light we see the men and Margrethe Bohr as ghosts in an afterlife, talking out why he might have come, enacting AND three versions of that evening.
it is awkward, of course: Denmark was under harsh Nazi occupation, Bohr was being watched. But they had been friends, Heisenberg almost an extra son to the couple. They worked together, walked, skied, took Bohr’s children to the beach. Warm laughter flares in reminiscence.
Why did he come? What was said on the brief walk, from which Bohr came back angry? Did the German come to warn, to ask advice scientific or ethical, or fish for information on the Allied nuclear programme?
Did Germany fail to make the atom bomb and devastate London and Paris because of a scientist’s moral scruples, or because of his failure to make a key calculation in kilogrammes?
Frayn cannot answer. But round go the conversations.
Paul Jesson is a peppery, patriarchal Bohr; Charles Edwards, as Heisenberg, is perfect in his fading boyishness: movingly awkward, loving his fatherland but aware of its evil.
Patricia Hodge is a devastating Margrethe, sardonically observing the men and outspokenly aware of the horror they might unleash by taking the idea of fission one step further. They talk of complementarity, particle uncertainty, chain reactions, critical mass, old arguments.
She says flatly: ‘The shining springtime of the 1920s produced a machine to kill every man, woman and child in the world.’
The play, perfectly realised here, is neat in physics metaphors, profound in ethical philosophy, sharp and sometimes funny in its human insight. But it is more than clever. When the three ghosts at last stand in the circle of dimming light, you shed a tear.
Not just for the horror that science unleashed on us, but for human love, curiosity and the burden which politicians place on innocent scientists who only want to know . . .