Copenhagen

Susannah Radford finds rich ideas in a play that intersects physics and relationships.

Article by Susannah Radford | 21 Apr 2009

How interesting is science? In Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, it’s riveting. Frayn, like Stoppard, is not afraid to make his audience think; writing plays of ideas, he keeps just within the grasp of our understanding to continually stretch us towards the truth. The characters, seeking to understand the past, pose the question: why did Werner Heisenberg visit his mentor Niels Bohr at the height of war in 1941? Bohr and Heisenberg can’t agree, so with Bohr’s wife Margrethe, they revisit the past, cleverly using their scientific concepts as a guide for debate.

Frayn prevents the play from drifting into lofty theory by grounding it in human relationships: that of father and son, husband and wife, observer and the observed, with acute insights into morality, ambition and most importantly science’s potential for destruction in certain hands. Stilted by memory, the arguments and accusations fly as randomly (or perhaps as predictably) as electrons and photons, but while it’s possible to calculate the movement of electrons and photons, it transpires that it’s nigh on impossible to reduce human motivation to the level of an equation.

Set against the backdrop of war, Copenhagen never fails to provoke and engage. Tony Cownie’s production is a solid one and the three actors make light work of the dense scientific principles. The final image of a possible future is brilliantly ghostly, ghastly and theatrical, however the ideas generated by this play are what linger most.

 

 

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 17 April – 9 May, various prices

http://www.lyceum.org.uk