In Michael Frayn's intense, thoughtful play Copenhagen, two physicists, Niels Bohr (Philip Bosco), a Danish Jew and father of quantum mechanics, and Werner Heisenberg (Michael Cumpsty), Bohr's young German protegee and author of "The Uncertainty Principle," meet in some sort of afterlife to debate the meaning of their lives, their collaboration, and their ideological conflicts. Most specifically, they re-live a mysterious meeting that took place in Denmark in 1941, when Heisenberg was chief of the Nazi A-bomb project. Any play in which the characters stand around with the sole purpose of equating their human behavior to their understanding of particles that spin around the nucleus of the atom necessarily demands complete attention. This debate takes place in the watchful and interpretive presence of Margrethe (Blair Brown), Bohr's wife.
Playwright Frayn, best known as the author of the popular farce Noises Off, as well as for his translations of Chekhov, does not spare us the highly technical language of mathematics and physics. He cleverly allows the play's central dramatic device, the slightly altered repetition of events and re-considered conversations, to clarify, for even the densest among us, the most complex theories.
Regardless of how you feel about what constitutes entertainment, I would like to wager that you will stay involved, engrossed, and fascinated by this surrealistical fantasy based on a very real but undocumented visit by Heisenberg, whose motives have been long debated. Was he -- a loyal German and professor of physics at Leipzig but not a Nazi -- trying to get from Bohr the equations that were eluding him in creating weapons of destruction and completing the bomb? Or was he procrastinating in his work because he was conflicted by the moral dilemma of his position? Serving as arbitrator and theorist, Margrethe prods the two scientists, once friends, into replaying, restating, and reconfiguring their relationship, philosophies and motives with the same impassioned integrity that they applied to their scientific research.
Bohr's irrefutable reasoning could not be better served than by Philip Bosco's stiff-necked countenance and resonant, authoritative voice. Michael Cumpsty, whom McCarter Theater audiences may remember as the young Orestes in Electra, is as splendidly invigorating as he is enigmatic to the play's end. He heightens the mysteries of Heisenberg's impenetrable agenda as his mathematical side collides with his human side in his curious attempt to reconcile guilt for his nation's war-making with his dedication to progress and science. Blair Brown, who most recently gave a luminous performance in the Broadway musical James Joyce's The Dead, is equally effective in the role of the objective onlooker who facilitates this meeting between the man she trusts and loves and the man whose remorse appears as real as his inconsistencies.
Designed by Peter J. Davison, the set -- an almost empty, circular forum-like chamber set with three chairs and a row of on-stage bleachers -- gives the impression of a heavenly courtroom. That two men would find themselves contemplating the activity of isotopes and neutrons in the hereafter is, in itself, a daunting thought. More daunting is Bohr's chilling remark that Heisenberg, for all his intentions, "never managed to contribute to the death of one single solitary person." Ultimately we see how the course of human history exists and is altered by the uncertainties and infinite possibilities of good and evil found in the limited minds of men, just as it is manipulated and redefined by the limitlessly circling, scientific matter of the universe.
