Copenhagen

121329 original

Physicist Werner Heisenberg is most famous for developing the Uncertainty Principle, so it's appropriate that he is the subject of Michael Frayn's confusing and inconclusive play. Dramatising a covert meeting in 1941 between German Heisenburg and his former mentor, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the play experiments with the possibility of the Nazis developing nuclear weapons at this time while wrestling with science's difficult relationship with ethics.

The play takes place beyond space and time as the two scientists, one a Nazi, the other a Jew, struggle to understand each other's intentions both at the time and retrospectively, and work out what was actually said. It's intensely complex and requires the audience's full attention, so the Incrementum Theatre Group's decision to play spirited piano music over their more dramatic exchanges was perhaps ill-considered.   

Copenhagen makes huge demands of its two leads, principally that they must appear to understand the labyrinthine mechanics of minute particles, and while Thomas Probert is arresting as Heisenberg, Ben Donaldson gives a faltering performance as the older Bohr. His Danish accent frequently lapses, although that he remembered Frayn's lines at all is praiseworthy. The script matches questions of physics with problems of morality, the physicists' razor sharp exchanges dazzling the audience into submission with their intricate scientific knowledge and its terrifying implications. A slower pace and less background noise would perhaps leave the audience wondering what they really discussed, rather than shrugging that they wouldn't understand it anyway.