Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn
Playhouse until Saturday 18th

The set is round, atomic, a concave shell of polished wood, a bland, unreflective surface that encircles the actors' energetic movement. A row of spectators has been seated in the set, as if they were students in a lecture hall, or a jury hearing evidence; their faces stare back at the audience proper. The three figures on stage are enclosed in this watching circle, by wood and gaze, their orbits observed, their words weighed. They circle each other, collide, deflect, behaving like the particles they describe, leaving trails of words and ambiguous intentions like electron clouds behind them. These traces repeat and accumulate, forming a tangled knot, at whose core uncertainty lodges: why did Heisenberg visit Nils and Margrethe Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941? What did he say to them, what did they say to him? Was he a traitor, a failure, or a hero? Could he have built the atomic bomb for Germany, was he warning or boasting of the prospect? Was it absolution he sought from Bohr, or prohibition? And why did neither Bohr nor Heisenberg perform the diffusion calculation that would have made the bomb seem all too possible (as the Americans did) - did they bluff themselves unconsciously? Did Heisenberg keep himself in deliberate uncertainty?

Michael Frayn's Copenhagen asks these questions again and again, exploring the ambiguity of history, the tendency of memory to rewrite itself, and addressing the central horror of the twentieth century: the deployment of the atomic bomb. Frayn applies the uncertainty principle to people: the subjective positions of the scientists prevent them from gaining any objective insight into their own intentions, or those of each other - their positions cannot be measured by each other's. The play becomes more than an untangling of that visit to Copenhagen: it becomes a speculation on the nature of science itself; on the extent to which science is entangled in the political and the personal; on the way man attempts to put himself at the centre of his universe, at the heart of his atom. Frayn's language is precise and motific, creating a portrait of both the scientific principles he describes and of the men who coined them. At times, this repetition of motifs wears thin - at the end of first act, it is hard to imagine how Frayn can spin out his word games for another act. The acting, though, is well-paced, with excellent characterizations by all three actors. They manage the jargon well, injecting it with passion, with humanity, and with only the occasional stumble or interruption.

Frayn asks important questions, and towards the end of the play, gropes towards a kind of absolution. But the sound effect of the bomb exploding in the second act seems incongruous - a sentimental intrusion on the clever, intellectual play of words and ideas, as does Heisenberg's brief collapse into guilt-stricken tears. Somehow, the real horror that should be at the heart of the play has been effaced, seems almost absurd, unreal, held at bay by physics and mathematics and words. Surely it was Frayn's intention to show the opposite - that uncertainty, physics and reason cannot blot that horror out.

Sharae Deckard, 14 / 08 / 01