Two thoughts buzzed around my head while watching the first UK revival of Michael Frayn’s 1998 megahit Copenhagen.
Number one, it’s astonishing that the first time around this hyper-dense show, substantially concerned with theoretical physics, ran in the West End for two years, following a year at the National.
And number two, it would probably land differently if the Americans nuked Tehran on press night which (at the time of writing) was a genuine possibility.
The play feels curiously more and less relevant than it must have done in the late ’90s, which should please venerable mischief maker Frayn (himself in his own nineties now).
In Michael Longhurst’s first UK revival we are in an abstract, lightly sketched version of the afterlife. Joanna Scotcher’s set is a revolving black disc of a stage (I think meant to resemble an atom), surrounded by black water. Pulsing lights hanging from the ceiling reflect gorgeously on the mirrored back wall – their reflection evokes the lights of a city, perhaps the Danish capital.
On the disc are three people: Danish theoretical physicist Nils Bohr (Richard Schiff), his wife Margrethe (Alex Kingston) and his German former protégé Werner Heisenberg (Damien Molony). Freely acknowledging they’re now dead, they dwell for almost three hours on a single meeting and its implications: what did Bohr and Heisenberg discuss, precisely, when the German came to visit his old mentor in occupied Copenhagen in 1941?
In a dizzyingly clever structure designed to reflect Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the very act of remembering – and all the emotions and feeling and politics that come with it - distorts the memory, leaving us never quite sure. We get the basic gist: it was about the nuclear bomb, and about Heisenberg’s tentative attempts to sound out what Bohr knew about Allied progress in making one, just as he agonised over the German effort.
It is a dense, unabashedly ideas-heavy play
Agonising is the order of the day: neither men are bloodthirsty idealogues; but whatever they did exactly, both felt compelled to work on their side’s respective bombs, dragged on by scientific zeal and personal concerns. Molony’s impassioned Heisenberg is no Nazi, but his attitude in 1941 combines a pragmatic sense that Germany has won the war (and before it committed the worst of its atrocities) with a genuine love of his country. Schiff’s Bohr is cagier. To some extent he has right on his side, and is dismayed by Heisenberg’s excuses for working on what amounts to a Nazi bomb; to some extent (and within the play’s complicated existential timeframe) he is clearly guilt -stricken about his contributions to the bombs dropped on Japan.
There is so much talking. It is a dense, unabashedly ideas-heavy play. It is often thrillingly clever, but its density can be tough for us and clearly tough on the cast – of the three actors it’s only Molony who seemed 100 percent on top of the text on press night, both in terms of not stumbling occasionally and also feeling entirely present in the character.
His two more famous co-stars are hardly terrible, but Schiff doesn’t make Bohr feel as passionately vibrant as Molonny, while one big moment apart, Kingston has the rather thankless task of being the moralistic ‘regular’ character caught up between two men who speak mostly in emotionally charged screeds of theory.
Staged after a recent glut of Stoppard revivals – many at Hampstead Theatre – I found it hard not to see Copenhagen as a splash sub-Stoppardian, with the late, great man’s audacity and cleverness but without his astounding wit. You could overstate this, but with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer still relatively recent, there’s perhaps the sense that agonising over the bomb is a relatively well-worn area at present.
Copenhagen remains an impressive play, although I couldn’t love it. Maybe it's had its day; maybe the performances weren’t quite there; maybe smartphones have disintegrated our frontal lobes to the point we can’t appreciate it as much as our ’90s ancestors; maybe I was distracted pondering how exactly its treatment of the dropping of the bomb as a monolithic thing locked in the past would stand up if the Americans bombed Iran. Whatever the reason, it’s remarkable, but less explosive than it once was.
