REVIEW BY MARK STOYICH
Copenhagen
By Michael Frayn
Sydney Theatre Company
With John Gaden, Jane Harders and Colin Friels
Wharf Theatre
Until July 14
Why did Werner Heisenberg, the leading German nuclear physicist during the World War II, visit his old teacher Niels Bohr in occupied Denmark in 1941? What did they talk about away from the Gestapo's microphones? And why was Bohr so angry afterwards? These are the questions Michael Frayn tries to answer in his play, Copenhagen. Or rather, does not answer.
The issues thrown up by this historical event, not least the scientific ones, are so extraordinarily complex that the audience is left none the wiser, but greatly the richer for having contemplated them. I can't think of any other play which goes so deeply into scientific concepts, except Tom Stoppard's Arcadia — and that is set in the 19th century, while the nuclear science in Copenhagen is absolutely central to our world today.
The mysteries the critic must contemplate, on the other hand, are: why has Frayn's play, which is extremely wordy and almost without dramatic action (he says he didn't expect at first to find a producer), been a great commercial success throughout the world? And why has it created such controversy, especially in New York?
The reason for the play's popularity, in spite of its abstruse subject matter, might be that it deals with real events that took place within living memory and which affect every human alive during the last 60 years. The play poses the question: what would have happened if Nazi Germany had developed nuclear bombs?
The consequences are vividly suggested during the play by a simulated atomic blast — an amazingly well-realised coup de theatre that would have been all the more chilling when originally staged in London, the city which would probably have been its target.
The second mystery is more complex. Frayn was attacked in New York for not mentioning the Nazi atrocities more, and for making Heisenberg seem too sympathetic a character. The first criticism is easily dismissed — as Frayn says, he would have thought the idea that the Nazis were bad was a given.
Of course, subtlety is not called for in the United States in matters of "axes" and "evil". I think it telling enough that when Heisenberg (played by Colin Friels) naively invites the half-Jewish Bohr (played by John Gaden) to visit his chalet in Germany, Bohr replies furiously that perhaps his wife could sew a yellow star on his ski jacket.
More importantly, one of the play's many points is that not only did the Nazis chase away or kill their most brilliant scientists, they also downgraded and discouraged experimental physics as somehow "Jewish". The Nazis' obsession with stale scraps of 19th century racial pseudo-science may have spared us the Nazi bomb.
As for Heisenberg's character, this issue was made even more complex when letters that Bohr had written to Heisenberg, but never sent, describing his memory of their meeting, were released to the public by Bohr's family in response to the controversy created by the play.
According to Heisenberg's account of events, when he told Bohr that an atomic bomb was possible, the Dane was shocked speechless. Bohr, in his unsent letters after the war, angrily countered that he was not shocked that a bomb was possible — he already knew that it was. Rather, he was offended that Heisenberg would work on one for Germany.
In Frayn's version, Heisenberg is not even aware that a bomb is possible. He has calculated, wrongly, that it is beyond Germany's grasp, and has no intention of trying to make one. Perhaps what Heisenberg really wanted, Frayn suggests, was a chat with his beloved mentor and, as Mrs Bohr (played by Jane Harders) says in the play, a sort of absolution.
Whichever happened in real life, in Frayn's play the three characters meet on a stage with the simplest and most effective of sets and explore the bounds of friendship, the power of uncertainty and the relativity of memory, against a historical backdrop that reminds us how contingent on individuals our fate is, and how we are all here by a sort of lucky grace.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, June 26, 2002.
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