Copenhagen, Program Notes
Playwright Michael Frayn on Copenhagen:
“The idea for Copenhagen came to me out of my interest in philosophy. It was when I read a remarkable book called Heisenberg’s War by Thomas Powers, that I came across the story of Werner Heisenberg’s visit to Niels Bohr in 1941. As soon as I read it I began to think that this story reflected some of the problems that I had been thinking about in philosophy for a long time.
“How we know why people do what they do, and even how one knows what one does oneself. It’s a fundamental question... this is the heart of the play. We can [in theory] never know everything about human thinking. I wanted to suggest with Copenhagen that there is some kind of parallel between the indeterminacy of human thinking, and the indeterminacy that Heisenberg introduced into physics with his famous Uncertainty Principle. Though I’m not trying to say they’re exactly parallel. The Uncertainty Principle says that there is no way, however much we improve our instruments, that we can ever know everything about the behavior of a physical object. And I think it’s also true about human thinking.
“It took me a long time to figure out how to do this play. I thought we needed three characters. We obviously needed Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, but I thought we needed Niels Bohr’s wife Margrethe as well...Partly because she historically had no scientific training and yet her husband discussed all his work with her. And they agree at the beginning that they are going to make everything plain to Margrethe. So Margrethe is our representative there.
“One of the more chastening, and also one of the most intelligent things that was said about the play, happened the first night in New York. I went backstage and I met a very tall, very charming young man who said, I am Werner Heisenberg’s son. ‘Of course your Heisenberg is nothing like my father,’ he said, ‘I never saw my father express emotion about anything except music.’ Well that was quite a chastening reminder that I was not actually going to have hit the real characters. But then he continued, ‘But in a play, I recognize you have to have characters who are rather more forthcoming than that.’ And I thought that this was a terrific understanding of what plays are doing. They are not just recording the historical record...but trying to find the truth that never quite got expressed in life. Niels Bohr never commented publicly on the meeting in his lifetime. He only told one or two family members and colleagues what he thought had happened at the 1941 meeting. He didn’t say anything more about it until after the war when Heisenberg tried to establish with Bohr what had occurred.
“Heisenberg was very eager to have some agreed version of the meeting established. But they couldn’t agree, so they abandoned the idea. Neither of them said anything more about it until some point in the 1950’s, when Robert Jungk wrote a book exculpating the German scientists, suggesting that they had tried to run some kind of resistance movement to Hitler. Heisenberg gave Jungk his version of the 1941 meeting, which appeared in the book. When Niels Bohr read Heisenberg’s account he was very angry. He thought that Heisenberg had completely misstated what had happened. Bohr wrote a letter to Heisenberg, but characteristically he didn’t send it. He went on redrafting it, just as he had always redrafted his scientific papers. In fact he went on redrafting it for the rest of his life. What he was trying to do — also very characteristic of Bohr — was to be very precise about what had happened in the meeting as he recalled it. I also think he was trying to find some way of disagreeing with Heisenberg, without hurting Heisenberg’s feelings.
“The letter was found after his death among his papers."
The London production of Copenhagen won the Evening Standard and two other Best Play awards. The Paris production received the Prix Moliére and the New York production won the Tony Award for Best Play.
