Copenhagen

Did you know that the collective noun for architects is “an argument”? After watching Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen - a three-person talkfest that imagines, among other things, just how close Hitler came to dropping an atomic bomb on London - one wonders if that should also apply to physicists too.

This three-hander has had a storied history that is up there with those of its famous protagonists. It debuted at the National Theatre in 1998 where it ran for more than 300 performances. Two years on, it ran for 326 more performances on Broadway. And two years after that, it was turned into a film with Daniel Craig, Stephen Rea and Francesca Annis. International productions have seen it travel the world from France to Finland and Turkey to Uruguay. And now it is at Hampstead Theatre, a venue that is never afraid to present utter head-scratchers from the world of science and beyond.

Quite why this play has had such success may be a mystery to those who came at it fresh. The initial effect is a bit like being trapped in a lift with two combative men who are much smarter than you, much older than you, and much more dead than you. It turns a fierce debate over ethics and science into a polite disagreement over tea and biscuits in Nazi-occupied Denmark.

The setup is simple, if you find PhD physics and the inner workings of the Third Reich’s nuclear ambitions "simple." Somewhere in the afterlife, we meet Werner “uncertainty principle” Heisenberg (the man who made "I don’t know where I am" a scientific law), Niels “complementarity” Bohr and Margrethe, Bohr’s wife. The German has forgotten exactly why he popped in to see his old mentor all those years ago and is hoping to find answers; the Norwegian helps him unravel his thoughts while Margrethe is there to act as a sort of intellectual referee and to remind us that behind every great man is a woman wondering why he can’t just say what he means for once.

The play doesn’t so much have a plot as such, more a series of "drafts" as the trio re-litigate the 1941 meeting from different angles in order to discover Heisenberg’s purpose. The characters are all ghosts now, which is a convenient way to excuse the eternal bickering these characters go through as they argue for what my watch somehow claims is less than three hours.

There’s luxury casting to sweeten what could otherwise be considered a verbal tsunami. Richard Schiff plays Bohr as the elder statesman who took Damien Molony’s Heisenberg under his wing in the 1920s only to see his protege leave for a prestigious job in Leipzig. Molony embodies wonderfully a grownup version of the wunderkind who bagged a Nobel Prize when aged just 32. Between them, Alex Kingston plays the astoundingly patient woman never afraid to challenge both men.

Frayn pumps out exposition and stories at a rate of knots, even into the final act. It is no surprise, therefore, that it takes quite a while to get round to finding out just why Heisenberg left his cosy German post heading up a department making a nuclear reactor to visit a frenemy hundreds of miles across Europe. The pair pace around the circular black stage like two alpha-male peacocks, if peacocks wore tweed and worried about the moral implications of global annihilation. They argue about who was the better physicist, who screwed up the world more, and who messed up the calculation for the critical mass of U-235.

When the script leaves the abstract behind, there is a lot of talk about cadmium rods, isotope separation and Uranium-235. If they handed out pocket calculators and sketchpads at the door, this could be classed as “immersive theatre”. For those who spent science class trying to melt a biro with a Bunsen burner, this can be heavy going.

Frayn can’t resist throwing in several large history books and an entire term of physics lecture into a Stoppardesque script that often seems to favour explaining who-did-what-why-when-where-and-how and the differences between particles and waves instead of anything resembling a storyline. He has, though, a sharp, cynical wit and understands that the real drama isn’t in the math; it’s in the ego. Predictably, Frayn takes the theorems and concepts (especially the Uncertainty Principle) and applies it to human motives. It’s an obvious move that pays off but only after several very wordy scenes.

Copenhagen is a brilliant, exhausting, and strangely funny look at how we justify our own disasters. One of Hampstead Theatre’s strengths is its willingness to challenge the intellect of their audiences through works like the prescient AI play Anthropology from Lauren Gunderson and Stella Feehily’s The Lightest Element. Director Michael Longhurst’s triumph here is to humanise these two titans known more for their Nobel Prize-winning achievements than their personalities. It suggests that even the people who mapped out the universe still put on their trousers one leg at a time, albeit sometimes back to front.

This is a play for people who think that the end of civilisation is a perfectly acceptable topic for a dinner party, provided the dialogue is snappy and the subtext is sufficiently bleak. If you like your drama with a side of quantum mechanics and a heavy dose of mid-century European guilt, it’s a riot. If you prefer your ghosts to rattle chains rather than equations, you might find yourself wishing that Heisenberg’s calculations had been a little more accurate.

Copenhagen continues at Hampstead Theatre until 2 May.


Photo credit: Marc Brenner