"Copenhagen"

September 3, 2009 — It was back to The Peterborough Players this evening for a performance of Michael Frayne's "Copenhagen." A bare circular stage tilted toward the audience and three chairs are the only props used by three actors in this two-hour play which is a fictionalized account of conversations between scientists Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Bohr's wife, Margarethe. An enormous amount of dialog is spoken, some scientific, some philosphical, some mundane. I don't know how actors do it. I can't memorize a phone number more than 30 seconds.

The play jumps around in time, but central to everything is a visit by Heisenberg to Bohr's Copenhagen home during the German occupation in 1941. During the visit, the two left the house for a 10-minute walk. What they discusssed is unknown, and both men's memories of the conversation were hazy. During the play, one of the men will often pace around the periphery of the circular stage, possibly a metaphor for electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom. Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle becomes a metaphor for the uncertainty of memory.

In the end, the two scientists ponder who suffers the greatest burden of guilt. Heisenberg remained in Germany and became a key player in Hitler's race to build the first atomic bomb. But Heisenberg failed, and was never responsible for a single death. Bohr went to America where he contributed to the successful development of the bomb which killed many millions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but forced the Japanese surrender and, for better or worse, launched the nuclear age.