Copenhagen (Michael Frayn)
A long time ago a friend told me that the key difference between Americans and Europeans was that Europeans didn’t assume they knew everything about themselves, that other people had a more privileged position from which to judge our character. That’s stuck with me for a long time and quite by accident has managed to be an important component of how I think about the world.
By the end of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen that is the answer we’re left with, that we need someone outside of us to interpret who we are and why we did what we did, and sometimes we need them to give us absolution and clarity and to insist when we are presented with seeing ourselves as lucky dopes or good martyrs, that we did good by choice instead of by accident.
The play presents a conversation out of time, a common trope in historical fiction that we’ve already seen this month in Photograph 51, among Heisenberg, Neils Bohr, and his wife Margrethe. Supposedly based on an actual meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr during the early days of WWII, with the two old friends on differing sides of the conflict, Frayn delicately twists the themes of this play into Heisenberg’s most well-known contribution: the uncertainty principle.
We cannot know how fast a particle is going and where it is at any one moment. This is because we cannot observe the particle directly and can only see byproducts of its movement, which necessarily disrupt the other measurement. So to, no one can know the thoughts of another person except by introducing something to change them.
Heisenberg works with the Nazi’s out of love for his homeland, but he isn’t depraved enough to give them an atomic weapon right? The Allied forces didn’t beat Germans to the bomb because they were better, but because Heisenberg was too noble to go down that path, or at least that’s what Heisenberg needs to believe of himself: that he is right both morally and scientifically.
It is a forgiveness that Bohr, and especially his wife, are not ready to give him. The first act simmers with barely disguised anger from the two Danes forced to live under German occupation while their “friend” hardly seems to care. The story drifts forward and backward through time as the three discuss physics and personalities, the love between two people, and the suffering behind different calls to duty.
I’m afraid I rushed the ending of this play. I surely missed something, my mind is slow and needs time to catch up to the intriguing puzzlebox Frayn made. I don’t know when, or if, I’ll ever return to it, but I hope someday I will. Copenhagen is minimalist theater at its best; not a spectacle for the senses, but a slow burn of tantalizing ideas carefully argued, brimming with humanity, which of course is the only thing that matters in the end.
