Copenhagen is a play by Michael Frayn, based on an event that occurred in Copenhagen in 1941, a meeting between the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, who had been Bohr's student. It premiered in London in 1998, at the National Theatre, running for more than 300 performances, starring David Burke (Niels Bohr), Sara Kestelman (Margrethe Bohr), and Matthew Marsh (Werner Heisenberg).[1]
It opened on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on 11 April 2000 and ran for 326 performances. Directed by Michael Blakemore, it starred Philip Bosco (Niels Bohr), Michael Cumpsty (Werner Heisenberg), and Blair Brown (Margrethe Bohr). It won the Tony Award for Best Play, Best Featured Actress in a Play, Blair Brown, and Best Direction of a Play (Michael Blakemore).
In 2002, the play was adapted as a film by Howard Davies, produced by the BBC and presented on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States.
Three spirits come together to try to apprehend and explain one simple question: "Why did Heisenberg go to Copenhagen?" The rest of the play details information around this subject through argument and interjections.[1]
Heisenberg – "No one understands my trip to Copenhagen. Time and time again I've explained it. To Bohr himself, and Margrethe. To interrogators and intelligence officers, to journalists and historians. The more I've explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become. Well, I shall be happy to make one more attempt."
Along the way, Heisenberg and Bohr "draft" several versions of their 1941 exchange, arguing about the ramifications of each potential version of their meeting and the motives behind it. They discuss the idea of nuclear power and its control, the rationale behind building or not building an atomic bomb, the uncertainty of the past and the inevitability of the future as embodiments of themselves acting as particles drifting through the atom that is Copenhagen.
In most dramas in which the characters are based on real people, there is a point at which the character deviates from the real person. However, playwright Michael Frayn worked to keep that distinction as small as possible. Having studied memoirs and letters and other historical records of the two physicists, Frayn felt confident in claiming that "The actual words spoken by [the] characters are entirely their own." With that in mind, the character descriptions apply to both the representative characters as well as the physicists themselves. There is a great amount known about all of the primary characters presented in Copenhagen; the following includes those bits of information which are directly relevant and referenced in the work itself.[2]
The construction of the plot is non-linear, seeing as it does not exist in time and space. Sometimes one character will not notice that there are other people in the space, and speak as if to no one. The world that Frayn presents is outside of our conceptions as audience members, simply by virtue of the fact that no one attending the play has ever died. So the world in which Copenhagen is based is somewhere between heaven and an atom.
It can also be thought to exist "inside the heads" of the characters present. It is a subjective world, taking and manipulating history, picking apart some events and mashing others together to better compare them. The characters are all plagued by some form of guilt or another, particularly in reference to the atomic bomb, and they are trapped in this world, doomed to forever speculate on that evening in Copenhagen in 1941 to determine how the world might have been changed. These are all traits of the artistic style known as Expressionism.
In his preface to A Dream Play, August Strindberg notes that in these worlds, "everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. Working with... real events as a background, the imagination spins out its threads of thoughts and weaves them into new patterns." Copenhagen is an embodiment of these principles.
Because the concepts in physics and politics are at times very complicated or very abstract, Frayn uses several controlling images to better relate certain ideas to his audience.
• Skiing and Table-Tennis – These two activities are referred to as a pastime of Bohr and Heisenberg's, and both demonstrate the competition between the two (representative of national competition.) They are also used to suggest Heisenberg's speed and recklessness which contrasts with Bohr's caution and tediousness.
• Invisible Straight – An anecdote in which Bohr managed to bluff himself in a game of poker by betting on a straight that he thought he had, but he really did not. That principle is applied to nuclear weaponry, suggesting that nations will act differently when they think that an opponent can produce nuclear arms, whether or not the opponent can.
• Cap-Pistols, Land Mines and Nuclear Reactors – These fall into the Toy vs. Weapon theme and once again presents anecdotes of Bohr and Heisenberg's lives. Their fascination in playing with the new toy blinds them to the danger that it poses.
• Bomb – The term "bomb" appears as a literal looming image in many cases, but it is used figuratively in a couple of instances, as if it should be a joke, but with such grave implications that it cannot be found funny. (For example, Heisenberg refers to a "bomb having gone off" in Bohr's head.)
• Christian Reaching for the Life-Buoy – Christian was one of Bohr's sons, who tragically drowned while he and Bohr were out sailing. The phrase "Christian reaches for the life-buoy" appears several times during the play, and every time, the characters seem to hold their breath in the hope that this time, Christian will survive. Bohr had concluded that they would have both drowned had he jumped in to save his son, which presents an idea of futile heroics, particularly with reference to Heisenberg and what should happen if he were to resist Hitler's rule.
• "Another Draft" – Whenever the characters conclude that an interpretation of their 1941 meeting is incorrect, they call for "another draft".
Though the dialogue does not contradict logic, it cannot be called realistic in the strictest sense. One character's line might fade into the next as though the second person knew exactly what he was going to say; sometimes a character will slip into a memory and partially relive a former or younger self in a monologue; and over the course of the show, there is a definite ambiguity as to whether they are speaking to one another or to the audience.
The play was originally written in English, but the real people in the exchange may have had the conversation in Danish or German, but even with translation in mind, Frayn defends that the words in the script are those that the characters would actually say. In his post-script, he writes, "If this needs any justification, I can only appeal to Heisenberg himself." Understandably, Frayn needs to present the characters in an interesting and dramatic light, as well as depicting a setting that no living person has visited, so the accuracy of such dialogue is subject to dwindle by degrees.
Plain language and scientific language both operate in the play. There are several instances when the two physicists start speaking too scientifically for many people to understand, and one of them will remark that they must revert to plain language, to explain it in a way that Margrethe will understand. Even for that effort, criticism arose about the complexity of the play and the difficulty for viewers to comprehend. A writer for The Commonweal commented on the Broadway premiere, saying that "the play's relentless cerebral forays can... be frustrating."
London Premiere – 1998
Copenhagen opened in the National Theatre in London and ran for more than 300 performances, starring David Burke as Niels Bohr, Sara Kestelman as Margrethe Bohr, and Matthew Marsh as Werner Heisenberg. It was directed by Michael Blakemore.
"Copenhagen" transferred to the Duchess Theatre in London's West End, where it ran from 8 February 1999, for more than 750 performances. It had a "second" cast when it opened in the West End, who were responsible for performing at least one of the matinee shows each week. The second cast consisted of David Baron as Niels Bohr, Corinna Marlowe as Margarethe Bohr, and William Brand as Werner Heisenberg, and after six months, they replaced the original cast for the rest of the West End run.
Broadway Opening – April 2000
Continuing under the direction of Michael Blakemore, it opened on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on 11 April and ran for 326 performances. Starring Philip Bosco as Bohr, Michael Cumpsty as Heisenberg and Blair Brown as Margrethe, it went on to win the Tony Award for Best Play, along with two others for Best Featured Actress in a Play (Blair Brown), and Best Direction of a Play (Michael Blakemore). But even for its success, Frayn admitted in an article that "A number of commentators expressed misgivings about the whole enterprise." Several critics noted that it was heavy with scientific dialogue, a little too heavy for the common audience. Though a writer from Physics World hailed it as "brilliant theatre ", a Charles Spencer, of the The Daily Telegraph, wrote, "I felt that my brain was being stretched to breaking point—well beyond breaking point, in fact."
International Productions
1999 – France
2000 – Denmark
2001 – Finland
2002 – Argentina
2003 – Spain
2017 – Italy
2019 – Spain
2022 – Turkey
2023 – Finland
TV Movie – 2002
The play was adapted as a television movie in 2002, with Daniel Craig as Heisenberg, Stephen Rea as Niels Bohr, and Francesca Annis as Margrethe Bohr. The movie substantially cuts down the script of the play, eliminating several recurring themes, and most of the material that established the community of scientists in Copenhagen. It also abandons the abstract staging of the theatrical version in favour of being set in the city of Copenhagen, in Bohr's old house.
Recent revivals
The play has had many productions and revivals, including:
Radio – January 2013
Adapted and directed by Emma Harding for BBC Radio 3 starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Werner Heisenberg, Greta Scacchi as Margrethe Bohr and Simon Russell Beale as Niels Bohr.
The meeting took place in September 1941 when Bohr and Heisenberg were 55 and 39, respectively. Heisenberg had worked with Bohr in Copenhagen for several years starting in 1924.
Much of the initial controversy stemmed from a 1956 letter Heisenberg sent to the journalist Robert Jungk after reading the German edition of Jungk's book, Brighter than a Thousand Suns (1956). In the letter, Heisenberg said he had come to Copenhagen to discuss with Bohr his moral objections toward scientists working on nuclear weapons but how he had failed to say that clearly before the conversation came to a halt. Jungk published an extract from the letter in the Danish edition of the book in 1956 that made it appear as if Heisenberg was claiming to have sabotaged the German bomb project on moral grounds.[18] Jungk omitted a critical sentence from Heisenberg: "I would not want this remark to be misunderstood as saying that I myself engaged in resistance to Hitler. On the contrary, I have always been ashamed in the face of the men of 20 July (some of whom were friends of mine), who at that time accomplished truly serious resistance at the cost of their lives."[19]
Bohr was outraged after reading the extract in his copy of the book, feeling that it was false and that the 1941 meeting had proven to him that Heisenberg was quite happy to produce nuclear weapons for Germany. Bohr drafted a number of letters about this issue, but did not send them.[20][21]
Jungk's book was influential on Frayn's play via the work of journalist Thomas Powers, who repeated the claims that Heisenberg had sabotaged the German nuclear program in a 1993 book, further asserting that the Copenhagen meeting was actually a counterintelligence operation to let Bohr in on what the Nazis were up to.[22] Frayn's play, which portrays Powers' theory sympathetically as a possible interpretation of the meeting, brought more attention to what previously had been a primarily scholarly discussion. After the play inspired numerous scholarly and media debates over the 1941 meeting, in 2002 the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen released to the public all sealed documents related to the meeting.[20]Among the documents were the unsent letters Bohr drafted to Heisenberg about Jungk's book and other topics.[23] Many historians have strongly criticised the play on the basis of the released letters, contending:[21]
A collection of historical essays provoked by the play was published in English in 2005,[24] with the vast majority of historians disagreeing with Frayn's depiction of the events.[19] In a March 2006 interview Ivan Supek, one of Heisenberg's students and friends, commented that "Copenhagen is a bad play" and that "Frayn mixed up some things". Supek also claimed that Weizsäcker was the main figure of the meeting. Allegedly, "Heisenberg and Weizsäcker came to Bohr wearing German army uniforms. Weizsäcker tried to persuade Bohr to mediate for peace between Great Britain and Germany and Heisenberg practically completely relied on his political judgement". Supek received these details in a confidential conversation with Margrethe, who thought he would never make them public. Supek however felt it was "his duty to announce these facts so that future generations can know the truth about the Bohr – Heisenberg meeting".[25]
In a 2016 assessment by Alex Wellerstein, the nuclear historian asserts that the truth of the Copenhagen meeting is that "we’ll never know, and it probably isn’t that important in the scheme of things". Nevertheless, he argues that Frayn's play creates a false balance in ascribing undue credibility to the theory (rejected by almost all historians) that Heisenberg sabotaged the German nuclear program, a theory Heisenberg did not directly advocate (being misquoted by Jungk) but also did not publicly dispute. The play was accurate in not portraying the Nazis as narrowly failing to obtain the bomb, but there were many other far more plausible reasons for their failure. On the other hand, Wellerstein praised the play for the moral questions it raised and for creating public interest in history.[19]
Over the course of the play, a number of renowned physicists are mentioned. Many of them are referenced in the context of their work with either Bohr or Heisenberg. This is the order they appear in the script:
{{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)