'Copenhagen' review — fraught real-world events lend new power to Michael Frayn's play

Read our review of Copenhagen, starring Richard Schiff, Damien Molony and Alex Kingston, now in performances at the Hampstead Theatre to 2 May.

Summary

• Michael Frayn's Copenhagen is revived at the Hampstead Theatre
• The play centres on a meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg
• Damien Molony and Richard Schiff play the physicists
• Alex Kingston co-stars as Bohr's wife Margrethe

Michael Frayn speaks up to his audience, and then some, in his demanding 1998 play Copenhagen, which against the odds was a commercial success back in the day in London and then again on Broadway and was adapted for a 2002 TV version starring Stephen Rea and Daniel Craig. Its current Hampstead Theatre iteration marks the historical drama's first reappearance in London, and it was heartening on press night to see its singular playwright in attendance, age 92.

I wish I could be as enthusiastic about Michael Longhurst’s approach to a play that has always had about it the whiff of a graduate seminar and here looks as if it is being visibly flayed by its creatives to whip its philosophical and scientific conundrums into vigorous, properly theatrical life.

But despite an often ominous soundscape and the deployment of three chairs that get tossed this way and that in accordance with the text, Joanna Scotcher’s clever dual-revolve turntable set can’t disguise a sense that the three actors on view haven’t all arrived at the same place. One might even say that they at times seem as adrift as a set encircled by water. (Neil Austin's lighting at one point revisits the blinding effect he deployed last autumn in Born With Teeth.)

In a sense, you can hardly blame them. Not many plays pose questions along the lines of “You’ve never totally accepted complentarity, have you?”. That query is here spoken by the Danish-Jewish physicist Niels Bohr (Richard Schiff) to his on-again/off-again colleague, Werner Heisenberg (Damien Molony), the German brainiac whom Bohr and his wife Margrethe (Alex Kingston) have regarded as a surrogate son. (The younger scientist’s filial status is amplified by our discovery during the play that the Bohrs lost their oldest son, Christian, in a boating accident in 1934.)

The start finds the three characters “lingering like ghosts”, to quote the practically minded Margrethe, who functions as narrator and referee while the two men circle – often quite literally – around matters of enormous import: the building of an atomic bomb and the need for a “quantum ethics” to align with such advances lest society otherwise risk annihilation.

Coming as it does at amidst a far more fraught realpolitik than was the case 28 years ago, the urgency of the subject matter on view lends considerable power to the emphasis in the closing passages on humankind “laid to dust”. Nor, I imagine, will many dispute Margrethe’s clear-headed view of “our ruined and dishonourable and beloved world” as we daily face heightened threats to the very fact of civilisation itself.

All of which accentuates the need for complete command of the dense text that asks why Heisenberg came to visit Bohr at his home during the Nazi Occupation of Denmark in 1941, and then proposes various answers, the narrative all the while ricocheting back and forth purposely resisting a particular solution.

To do so would allow the very certainty inimical to the Uncertainty Principle espoused by Heisenberg. Bohr, we know, left Denmark in 1943 to extend his research into atomic fission to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, which would lead to the deaths in Japan of 100,000 people. Is this man therefore culpable by association? His ever-loyal wife thinks not.

At the same time, Heisenberg – the play’s defining role – is seen to ponder the prospect of nuclear reactors only to debate the quantity of the uranium isotope U-235 needed to produce a bomb. He was among the Germans detained after the war in the Cambridgeshire facility, Farm Hall, dramatised in Katherine Moar’s 2023 play of the same name, where the relationship between scientific enquiry and moral responsibility loomed comparably large.

The success since this play’s premiere of the Oscar-winning movie Oppenheimer in some ways allows for a way into its potentially abstruse realm that wasn’t available back in the day, and I leant into the action this time round far more than I recall at Copenhagen's National Theatre premiere.

But there’s simply no way of getting around the fact that the current cast, at least at present, doesn’t exert the rigour needed for this of all plays, Schiff in particular seeming to drift in and out of the action (and his lines), only to swoop in suddenly with rather bizarre vocal crescendos. (These three of all real-life characters would know their chosen material cold.)

Such hesitancy must be tricky for the others, of whom Molony seemed on press night the most assured, notwithstanding slips in and out of his own Irish accent which makes one wonder why he is bothering with an American one at all. The net result is that you depart after nearly three hours agog at Frayn’s Stoppardian ability to aim unabashedly for the intellect even as discussion during the play of “one more draft, one final draft” makes one wish for a production on surer footing that doesn’t itself feel in theatrical terms like a draft.

Copenhagen is at the Hampstead Theatre to 2 May. Book Copenhagen tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Copenhagen (Photos by Marc Brenner)