Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" at PlayMakers
PlayMakers Repertory Company Review - Copenhagen
By Scott Ross
This much is known: in 1941, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg traveled, at no small risk to himself, to occupied Copenhagen, meeting there his old mentor and one-time colleague Niels Bohr. It had been their habit when talking together to walk outside, and with the Bohrs’ home almost certainly bugged by the Germans, perambulation seemed the safest course.
That stroll was exceptionally brief. After a few minutes Bohr returned in a rage, and Heisenberg departed. The subject of their conversation -- and the reason for Bohr’s fury -- has remained something of a tantalizing mystery, although there is a strong belief that it likely concerned German efforts toward producing an atomic bomb. From this famous (or infamous) incident, the British dramatist Michael Frayn fashioned his provocative, intellectually bracing three-hander Copenhagen, the 2000 Best Play Tony Award® winner currently being given spirited life at PlayMakers Repertory Company.
Somewhat astonishingly, Frayn manages to give, in his dramatic crash-course on physics, precisely enough information on the subjects debated by his characters -- quantum physics, Complimentarity and, particularly, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, a key concept here -- that his audience (like Margrethe, Bohr’s scientifically untrained wife) can follow the free flow of ideas without confusion. (Although it must be exquisite hell for the actors to learn.) Through the striking use of metaphor, and the recurrent notion of seeing the 1941 meeting -- like drafts for a scientific paper -- from various angles and perspectives, Frayn illuminates Uncertainty in more ways than one. (Interestingly, he used a similar device to quite different effect in his great backstage farce Noises Off.)
The playwright’s innate theatricality is exhilarating; Copenhagen is not so much a variation on Rashomon (three perspectives of the same incident) as it is a depiction of what might have been said and done in a crucial moment, now lost to view. Bohr, Heisenberg and Margrethe circle each other continuously, electrons revolving around a nucleus whose essential component is a riddle. As Frayn himself notes, “The Uncertainty Principle says that there is no way, however much we improve our instruments, that we can ever know everything about the behavior of a physical object. And I think it’s also true about human thinking.”
Frayn, one of the finest of all Chekhov translators, writes dialogue ironic (Bohr to Margrethe: “My dear, no one is going to develop a weapon based on nuclear fission”), plangently repetitious (Heisenberg’s repeated phrase “If something works, it works,” which begins to achieve truly unnerving connotations) and strikingly visual, as when Heisenberg describes walking through a Berlin raining phosphorous into puddles (“My shoes kept bursting into flame”).
Copenhagen addresses some of the profoundest questions of human existence -- indeed, the easily imagined end of humanity itself. Was Heisenberg working on the bomb or was he, as he later claimed, subtly working against it? Did he, through a kind of passive resistance, deliberately miscalculate the essential numbers? Could a man of his keen competitiveness bear to cede so momentous a scientific discovery to others -- especially those nations arrayed against his beloved Germany? Did he bear the guilt of consigning his countrymen to their bitter ruination while simultaneously saving the world from the ghastly specter of a nuclear-armed Adolf Hitler? Or had he, as some have imagined, hopes of luring Bohr to collaboration in Germany? (Since Bohr was half-Jewish and the Nazis had already, in their typically self-defeating fashion, purged all Jews from German science, this seems the least likely explanation.)
Drew Barr, who a few seasons back mounted a superb production of the lovely Jeanine Tesori-Brian Crawley musical Violet at PRC, has directed his cast of three with perfect fluidity and grace, complimenting and expanding upon Frayn’s ideas. He does so in large part through the evocative use of Narelle Sissons’ ingenious set, which mirrors Bohr’s concept of the atom: electrons jut out at right and left angles, up- and downstage -- two of them bearing complimentary floors of gravel and sand -- leaving the central playing area as a nucleus (although the rather hideous green covering is suggestive not so much of grass as of a well-used billiard table). Similarly, Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting is effective, but there are perhaps a few too many blackouts and cross-fades, although her approximation of an atomic blast -- in concert with M. Anthony Reimer’s rather terrifying sound effect -- builds to a doom-laden intensity of orange.
Barr’s actors could scarcely be improved upon as they essay Frayn’s overlapping dialogue and three-pronged arguments with flawless élan. Greg Thornton is, it seems to me, an ideal Bohr -- kindly and warm, now cautious, now distraught and finally, combative. Todd Weeks embodies Heisenberg’s rigorous intellectual competitiveness as well as his curious affability -- wanting so badly to be loved, to remain the good son to his adoptive father figure. (He is, as he well knows, the Prodigal, as grave a disappointment to his mentor as the accidental death of Bohr’s own son.) There is a splendid moment in the first act when Weeks, invoking 1937 by remarking “Just when all my troubles -- ” turns his head away from the Bohrs, open-mouthed, coming to a dead stop. It’s a thrillingly elliptical moment. Has the actor gone up on his lines? Will Heisenberg speak again? When? Even better is the Margrethe of Nicole Orth-Pallavicini: proud, courageous, intelligent, outraged, and yet never pushing Margrethe beyond her essential dignity. Her vocal control is a thing to cherish, rich in timbre without any recourse to histrionics.
In a season which has already included a beautifully observed production of Not About Heroes, with Copenhagen PlayMakers continues to sustain its considerable reputation as one of the finest of all local -- and regional -- companies.
John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.
posted by Scott Ross at 9:41 AM
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