'Copenhagen' captures ambiguities
of life during wartime Highly-recommended
reviewed by Hedy Weiss
August 30, 2005
TimeLine Theatre is giving
us a blistering new production of "Copenhagen"
-- British playwright Michael Frayn's Tony Award-winning
drama about a crucial moment in the early 1940s when
the race to devise an atomic bomb was under way on several
fronts. And it might well be viewed as the company's
third installment in an unofficial trilogy about the
World War II era and its legacy.
Consider the entries: Last season's
memorable revival of Noel Coward's "This Happy
Breed" looked at the between-the-wars period in
England. The company's earlier premiere of Kate Fodor's
"Hannah & Martin," in which two German-bred
philosophers -- one a Nazi sympathizer, one a Jewish
emigre -- ferociously debated their ethical and intellectual
positions, gave voice to many of the moral issues of
the time. And now, in the first mounting of Frayn's
play by a Chicago ensemble, TimeLine has seized hold
of a work that looks back to the fall of 1941, just
as the lid began to be lifted on that Pandora's box
known as nuclear weapons -- a box whose lid we are still
trying to jam back on.
The multilayered "Copenhagen"
is a brilliant and demanding play, as well as an infuriating
one. And whatever arguments you might want to pick with
the playwright, it is receiving a first-class rendering
here. Director Louis Contey has assembled three of the
theater's most distinguished "regulars" --
Terry Hamilton, P.J. Powers and Isabel Liss -- and set
them to work at a terrific clip as they argue about
everything from nuclear reactions and the Uncertainty
Principle to national loyalties and personal passions.
It all unspools from beyond the grave,
with designer Brian Sidney Bembridge's elegantly autumnal
architectural backdrop suggesting the aristocratic Danish
home of Neils Bohr (the warmly patrician Hamilton),
one of the pioneering elder statesmen of European physicists,
and his wife, Margrethe (the wonderfully sardonic and
insightful Liss). It is here, in the fall of 1941, that
they received a surprising visitor, the brilliant German
physicist Werner Heisenberg (Powers in a performance
of crackling vitality). A former protege of Bohr, he
is working for his "homeland," Hitler's Germany.
Why did Heisenberg, then in early
middle age, make a most unorthodox visit to see his
beloved mentor Bohr, who was half-Jewish and living
on the edge of danger in a German-occupied city? Did
he come to try and ferret out where the Allies were
in their research on fission? Did he hope to make a
pact with Bohr by which they would both attempt to thwart
efforts to pursue the creation of such weapons? Or was
he simply the ever-ferocious competitor, just trying
to get the upper hand in a globe-altering scientific
race?
At the same time, if the Rashomon-like
interpretations of what went on in that meeting are
any indication, isn't all of life a perfect illustration
of the Uncertainty Principle, a theory meant to be applied
to particles? Isn't it ultimately impossible to really
measure all aspects of a particular event or intention
and, by extension, determine blame or guilt?
You want moral ambiguity? Frayn serves
it up in heaping portions. He also turns the stage into
a courtroom, making the audience the jury. Each scene
of the play is designed to serve as a "draft"
of a final theoretical paper -- one in which Frayn presents
each character's take or "testimony" about
his or her wartime choices. In the process, the playwright
appears to be searching furiously for some way of rehabilitating
Heisenberg, or at least raise enough questions to give
him the benefit of the doubt. He can't quite nail the
case, and Margrethe Bohr offers a welcome skepticism
to counter her husband's surfeit of collegial and paternal
affection for Heisenberg. But he does proceed to indict
the United States for being the first to drop the atomic
bomb.
In fact, Frayn is so fervent in his
outrage about the 100,000 Japanese killed by the bomb,
and about the damage done to German cities, that he
never fully mentions the 6 million who perished in the
Nazi camps. And at times you just want to ask him: Would
you have preferred that the Allies hadn't smashed Germany,
and left you to live in an England ruled by Hitler's
successors?
All that said (and what feels like
one too many "drafts"), the bristling characters
and heated arguments in this play are enough to keep
you riveted. And the actors -- who breathe fire into
a tremendously dense script -- are superb. In fact,
I've seen this play three times by now and only grasped
some things for the very first time in this production.
