At Chichester Festival theatre until 22 September.Even if the science wasn’t as clear as it could be, it remains a remarkable play that has the rare capacity to make ideas manifest. However, while conveying Bohr’s paternal authority and impatience, Paul Jesson gave a rather blurred first-night performance and even rushed though vital speeches explaining Schrödinger’s wave function and uranium 235. Patricia Hodge captures perfectly the wary scepticism of Margrethe, who sees the personal motives underlying scientific abstractions. Michael Blakemore’s illuminating production – designed, as in 1998, by Peter J Davison and lit by Mark Henderson – treats the stage as a space for the collision of human particles.Ĭharles Edwards is outstanding as Heisenberg in that he combines a Hamlet-like uncertainty about his own course of action with the physicist’s faith in intellectual disciplines: at one point he cries “mathematics is sense” with the fervour of an ardent rationalist. In Michael Frayn's new play, an ambitious, fiercely intelligent, and daring dramatic sensation, Heisenberg meets Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, once again to look for the answers and to work out - just as they had worked out the internal functioning of the atom - how we can ever know why we do what we do.While those ideas are still there, I was more struck this time by the Brechtian paradox at the heart of the play: that the vilified Heisenberg, by his failure to make the crucial calculation that would have enabled the Germans to develop the atomic bomb, never caused a single death while the virtuous Bohr, by going on to work at Los Alamos, contributed to a hundred thousand. : Copenhagen (9780385720793) by Frayn, Michael and a great selection of similar New, Used and Collectible Books available now at great prices. Why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen and what he wanted to say to Bohr are questions that have exercised historians ever since. The meeting was fraught with danger and embarrassment it ended in disaster. But now the world had changed, and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionized atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. After leaving the Observer he continued to. He began his career as a reporter for the Guardian and later the Observer. Summary: 'Copenhagen is a reimagining of the mysterious wartime meeting between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb. Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933.

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