Stephen Gray
Midway through Michael Frayn’s eloquent, passionate play Copenhagen, one wonders if there could possibly be anything further to be talked through. Two Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicists, the Danish Niels Bohr and his former German assistant Werner Heisenberg, have batted out how their theories of uncertainty, of complementarity and quanta have intersected, diverged. They have shown how canny academic papers may lead to chairs, how their colleagues (all Jews) may have outwitted rising Nazi gentiles.
What is more, they have discovered that matter the size of a tennis ball might just commence the destruction of the planet.
But Frayn has Bohr’s wonderful wife Margrethe – strong-jawed in the photo, and sternly played by Jennifer Steyn – watching over them. On our behalf she comments on how the lads misremember their breakthroughs. Although they awesomely opened the universe between them in the 1920s, they now are becoming sworn antagonists. Bohr will defect to Britain to build the bomb that Heisenberg wishes will not have to be dropped on himself and his collapsing homeland.
In the devastating second half it seems as if all Frayn’s twisted, tortured talk around and about the point has become too solemn to bear. It is just horror unchained. Heisenberg’s shoes catch fire with phosphorus and Bohr crawls on his hands and knees down a beach to be smuggled out. Freighters coming in at night to pick up more Jews. Children starving en masse. Lives worth a packet of Lucky Strike.
Around these images, Frayn’s play clusters in a civilised and urbane way, to be sure, hardly ruffled. Dale Cutts putters and ponders well as Bohr; Nicky Rebelo stays suited and urbane as his sidekick. With Margrethe they are trapped on a circular stage, as Maurice Podbrey directs them, replaying that pivotal night in Copenhagen in Autumn 1941 when they almost asked that unfathomable question: is there any morality at all in nuclear fission? Hamlet is the other play set in Copenhagen often referred to, so the message is: corrupt. Corruption always does make for spellbinding theatre.
Copenhagen is on at the Agfa Theatre on the Square in Sandton, Johannesburg, until April 1, before touring to Durban and Cape Town