The science may be dense, but Michael Longhurst’s intelligent production breathes life into the knotty personal and global issues at stake in this face-off between Werner Heisenberg and his erstwhile mentor Niels Bohr.
It’s lean forward theatre as you strain to catch thought experiments and theories about uncertainty and complementarity – so it’s a shame that West Wing and The Good Doctor star Richard Schiff’s softly-voiced performance of principled decency doesn’t quite reach the back of the theatre.
He’s the Nobel prizewinning Danish physicist who came up with the model of the atom, while Damien Moloney (Being Human) is the younger but no less brilliant expert in Quantum Mechanics.
Meanwhile Alex Kingston is Bohr’s wife Margrethe – powerfully embodying the dryly humorous everywoman who grounds this complex theory in everyday life.
These three have been very close, but the war has sundered their friendship.
Moloney’s youthful Heisenberg is an ardent but conflicted German patriot now running the Nazi’s nuclear programme, while the half Jewish Bohr will soon be forced to flee Copenhagen and wind up assisting Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.
So why did Heisenberg make this extremely awkward visit to his former friend in September 1941?
Historians have argued the toss for years – was it to tip him off about German nuclear ambitions, seek moral guidance, or a hostile bid to gauge how far the Allies had got with their bomb?
Understanding that Heisenberg’s intentions are unknowable – Frayn cleverly replays the meeting several times with the characters looking back after death, to capture an emotional or dramatic truth.
Joanna Scotcher’s circular set, lapped by waves of water, has a travelator on which the pacing protagonists embody atomic principles – altering each other’s trajectory as they bounce off each other – with Margrethe often centrally placed as the nucleus.
Lit by suspended lightbulbs that dim and flare, the trio enact a thought experiment – did Heisenberg deliberately focus his wartime research on nuclear energy to avoid WMD falling into the hands of a madman?
At a time when enriched uranium has again sparked war, Frayn’s still relevant play also explores the irony that Hitler’s blind spot – virulent antisemitism – forced many brilliant minds to work for the other side so the Nazis never made the bomb.
And while it celebrates the flowering of scientific genius in the early years of the 20th century that unlocked the laws of the universe – it’s not lost on us that these clever men also gave us the means to obliterate it.
Copenhagen runs at Hampstead Theatre until May 2.
