Theatre review: Copenhagen

When Copenhagen was scheduled for a revival at Hampstead Theatre it probably felt like a timely choice because of the recent success of Farm Hall and the film Oppenheimer, but as invariably and depressingly seems to happen, current affairs have delivered another reason for Michael Frayn's play about nuclear physicists to feel topical. In the first six years of me writing this blog I could reliably catch Big Favourite Round These Parts Damien Molony on stage once a year, but he's been absent for nearly a decade before returning to play Werner Heisenberg, the leading nuclear physicist who led the German team attempting to develop nuclear weapons during the Second World War. His other most famous accomplishment is the Uncertainty Principle, and the play centres on a historical mystery that even the participants seemed uncertain about, with both central figures giving conflicting accounts later in life.

In 1941 Heisenberg went to Copenhagen, during the German occupation of Denmark, to meet with his former mentor Niels Bohr (Richard Schiff) and his wife Margrethe (Alex Kingston.)

There was a parent-son dynamic between them that persists even though Heisenberg was present when one of the Bohrs' actual sons drowned, and that isn't even quite shaken by the tense circumstances of this unusual reunion. The conflicting forces and possibilities of how the meeting could have panned out are represented by Frayn framing this as a memory play, with the trio looking back after their deaths and recreating the scene with the full knowledge of what came after: Heisenberg was working for the Nazis but his team never came close to developing the bomb; Bohr has the moral high ground in 1941 but he eventually joined the team that did end up obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Michael Longhurst's production takes place on a double revolve, which Joanna Scotcher has placed in the middle of a pool of sometimes-choppy water. Together with Neil Austin's lighting it provides a hazy backdrop of the titular city that helps create the suggestion of a world part-real, part-memory, part-rewriting of history. The circular stage also means that the characters get choreographed into the positions of particles as they discuss the physics that plays into the history.

It's the latter that's of more interest to me - my mind did wander during some of the technical discussions about quantum physics, not helped by Schiff not always being entirely audible, and sometimes letting his dialogue tail off entirely with Molony needing to fill in the gaps. But I do find a grim fascination in this element of history, and how the German scientists were nowhere near developing a bomb, but the Americans were so convinced there was a genuine arms race they poured enough money into it to make it a reality.

I hope we don't have to wait as long for Molony's next stage appearance - not just for obvious reasons

but because he's what holds the evening together, his charm on the one hand showing how easily the Danish couple return to their old affectionate relationship with Heisenberg after being determined to shun him, but also making us wonder to what extent he's manipulating the story to minimise his own culpability. As the play goes over different versions of the visit we get theories that he's essentially there to spy for the Nazis and find out what Bohr knows about the Manhattan Project, or trying to get clues to help his own research.

But the version Heisenberg himself wants to promote is that he's there to suggest both sides self-sabotage so that the bomb never gets developed in the first place. He ultimately suggests that this is what he did anyway, with the recordings from Farm Hall showing that he was perfectly capable of doing the right maths once he knew the race was over but had, presumably deliberately, wildly miscalculated while it was still possible he might deliver the bomb to Hitler. Heisenberg certainly says something to Bohr offstage that the older man finds unforgivable, but it's interesting that while Bohr is furious with his former assistant for aligning himself with the Nazis for self-preservation, at no point does he think he might agree with them ideologically. (Meanwhile on the way out an American audience member concluded "So Michael Frayn is a Nazi?" which is definitely... a take.)

Kingston is also strong as Margrethe, whom the scientists have always used as a litmus test for their theories - they believe anything they put into an academic paper should first be comprehensible to her as a non-physicist - but who has also given herself the role of their moral compass. Copenhagen asks for a lot of the audience's time to delve into scientific theory, moral quandaries and historical mysteries, and at times it can be overwhelming, but at its best the heated dialogue really draws you in, and Longhurst's production uses a simple setup to keep things surprisingly visually interesting.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is booking until the 2nd of May at Hampstead Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.