Wordy and intense, Michael Frayn’s dramatisation of the 1941 visit by Werner Heisenberg to his old mentor Niels Bohr in Copenhagen at first seems to lend itself to the ears. Under Tony Cownie’s deliberately paced direction however, as the tempo builds with the emotion of the interaction between the two men, this quickly becomes a thing of the stage.
It is of particular historical interest as Heisenberg was the leading German theoretical nuclear physicist of the time and chief nuclear bomb maker for the Third Reich.
Occurring in a never land of the afterlife, the five ascending pillars or Neil Murray’s otherwise largely bare set suggest this is part of something altogether bigger than the meeting itself. But, obeying Heisenberg’s theory on uncertainty, the more you can examine and measure one aspect of it, the less you can know about the others.
Owen Oakeshott as Heisenberg, Tom Mannion as Bohr and Sally Edwards as his wife and secretary, Margrethe, succeed in bringing vitality to their memories of the past - and the differing recollections of the fateful meeting itself. Most importantly, they create a path of clarity through the theory and history of the physics which both men were innovating.
After a first half which barely pauses for breath, the second is rather hobbled by a hesitancy on Mannion’s part - only partially attributable to his characterisation of Bohr. Yet the spotlight remains focused, piercing the role of peer group regulation and science’s relationship with the state to examine such fundamentals as the morality of the physics itself.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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