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| Martha Henry stars in Toronto production of Copenhagen
as the wife of a Danish scientist. Although Margrethe Bohr didn't
attend the secret 1941 meeting between her husband and colleague Werner
Heisenberg, she was added to the script to represent the audience. |
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Minds over matter
Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, a play about a secret meeting between nuclear scientists, opens in Toronto
ROBERT CREW
ARTS WRITER
The hottest playwright in Britain right now? That may very well be a tall, courtly, bespectacled, 70-year-old writer and translator named Michael Frayn. Frayn's latest work, Democracy,
which played to capacity houses at the Royal National Theatre's
Cottesloe Theatre before closing at the end of December, will transfer
to the larger Lyttleton Theatre in March. The following month, it will
move to London's West End, where it will settle in for a run at the
Wyndham's.And his previous play, Copenhagen, has become a
worldwide hit since it was first staged in 1998, winning major prizes
such as a New York Tony and a couple of London awards for best new play.Copenhagen, it should be noted, is about a meeting between two nuclear scientists in 1941; Democracy is about Willy Brandt and West German politics in the late 1960s.Hardly the traditional notion of what constitutes commercially successful fare. "I was astonished when the National Theatre said it was going to do Copenhagen," says Frayn, via telephone from his home in London, adding —with a touch of understatement — that the success of Democracy, "a play about the German parliamentary democracy," is also "very surprising. "It is a pleasant truth that nobody really knows what is going to be a hit play," he says.Five years after its London opening, Toronto finally gets its chance to see the controversial and much lauded Copenhagen,
described by the New York Times as "the most invigorating and ingenious
play of ideas in many a year" and "filled with a crackling, questing
vitality."Ed and David Mirvish have picked up a Canadian
production (originally presented by Ottawa's National Arts Centre and
the Neptune Theatre in Halifax) for a two-month engagement at Toronto's
Winter Garden Theatre. The production, which opens Wednesday
and runs until Feb. 22, stars three of Canada's leading actors — Martha
Henry, Michael Ball and Jim Mezon — and is directed by Diana Leblanc. The
play centres on a secret meeting that took place in Nazi-occupied
Copenhagen in 1941 between German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg
and his Danish associate and former teacher Niels Bohr, who later
became a key figure in the U.S. program that developed the atom bomb.The
men were close colleagues and had revolutionized atomic physics in the
1920s with their work on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty
principle — that momentum and position of a particle cannot both be
precisely determined at the same time.But what was the purpose
of the meeting? To this day, no one knows precisely what they talked
about, although there is suspicion that the Nazis may have tried to
eavesdrop on the meeting. "Maybe there is a tape in some dusty archive
somewhere," says Frayn.Although Heisenberg, who was in charge of
the Nazi nuclear program, wrote letters home to his wife about his trip
and mentions a couple of meetings with Bohr, he did not reveal anything
about their conversation. Bohr, whom Frayn describes as "a
sweet-natured and kindly man," only wrote about it many years later.What
is known, however, is that the meeting ended the friendship between the
two men. "Bohr became angry and upset and never managed to put the
relationship back together," says Frayn.The conversation between
the two scientists has been the subject of hot debate for many years
and some historians have speculated that the two were debating whether
the Nazis or the Allies should "discover" the atom bomb first.Then
there is the possibility that Heisenberg was trying to recruit Bohr or
trying to tip him off about the German nuclear program, knowing that
the information would quickly be relayed back to the Allies. Or was
Heisenberg simply seeking advice from his mentor?
`It is a pleasant truth that nobody really knows what is going to be a hit play'Michael Frayn, left, commenting on the success of Copenhagen and his latest work, Democracy, both of which focus on subjects that aren't usually deemed commercially viable fare.
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Frayn heard of the meeting during his time as a philosophy
student at Cambridge University but only began to think of turning it
into a play after reading Heisenberg's War by Thomas Powers.On
one level, says Frayn, the play is a "whydunnit" — an intellectual
thriller revolving around the purpose of Heisenberg's trip. (Frayn has
a possible explanation, which comes at the end of the play.)But there is a deeper level as well."There
seemed to me to be a parallel between the uncertainty that Heisenberg
introduced into physics with the uncertainty principle, and the
indeterminacy of human thinking," Frayn says. British critic
Michael Billington has described the play as not just a cerebral
thriller or a morality play about scientific responsibilities but also
"a profoundly moving meditation on the uncertainty of human motivation
and the infinite mystery of a universe we grapple unavailingly to
understand."Frayn frames the moral debate by conjuring up three
ghostly figures — the third is Bohr's wife Margrethe who, in a sense,
represents the audience."If we simply heard Heisenberg and Bohr
in conversation, you and I wouldn't have much idea of what they were
talking about," says Frayn. How we can know why people do what
they do, and trying to impose some sort of pattern on a chaotic world
have certainly been characteristic preoccupations of Frayn's work
throughout his career. "We spend most of our lives trying to
assess people's intentions — is that person's behaviour going to be
aggressive? Our brains do this all the time," he notes. "I am trying to
understand why people do what they do, to understand, but not to
approve or disapprove of it."Trying to regain some control over life is the engine that drives Frayn's classic farce Noises Off, now
more than 20 years old and firmly established as a classic of the
repertoire. Recently revived on Broadway, a new production of Noises Off will be presented by the Stratford Festival this summer, under the direction of Brian Bedford. Born
in London, Frayn worked as a reporter and columnist for two leading
British newspapers — the Guardian and the Observer — after graduating
from Cambridge.It was at this time that he wrote a series of brilliant comic novels that drew on his journalistic experiences, including The Tin Men (1965) and Towards The End Of The Morning (1967).More recent novels include A Landing On The Sun (1991), Headlong (1999), which was shortlisted for a Booker Prize, and Spies (2002), a story of childhood set in England during World War II.Spies won the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award and a 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize.He began writing plays in the early 1970s; his first commercial hit was Noises Off, which brought international recognition. His 1984 play Benefactors has
also received productions worldwide and he has translated a number of
works from Russian, including plays by Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy.Screenplays include Clockwise,
a 1986 comedy starring John Cleese as a headmaster frantically racing
against time to get to a convention where he is due to make a speech.Frayn married the award-winning biographer and critic Claire Tomalin in 1993.
I first met him a year before that when I conducted an onstage
interview with him as part of Harbourfront's Reading Series. I remember
him as a fluent and agile interviewee who made the task easy for me.
He, too, remembers the occasion: "It went extremely well," he says.Frayn's current project is turning Spies
into a movie script. The film will be directed by his daughter Rebecca
and is scheduled to go into production next year. "We are getting along
very well together," Frayn says.It would be highly surprising if it were otherwise.Additional articles by Robert Crew
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