All About Jewish Theatre - Michael Frayn:Getting to the nucleus of Copenhagen

Michael Frayn's Copenhagen is not your typical controversial play. Usually when the word "controversy" is attached to a night out at the theatre, it means audiences can expect to be shocked by sensational depictions of sex or violence on stage. In Copenhagen, however, there is not even the intimation of sex, and any violence that occurs is far out of sight; it's the British playwright's ideas that have resulted in passionate debate. And rather than create a brief furor in the tabloids, the Copenhagen controversy has played out for the past 5 1/2 years in scientific, historical and philosophical symposiums around the world.

All of which came as a surprise to Frayn, the 70-year-old writer whose previous big theatrical hit was the 1982 backstage farce Noises Off. He didn't think Copenhagen -- about a real-life visit German physicist Werner Heisenberg made to his Danish mentor, Niels Bohr, in the middle of the Second World War -- would be of much interest to anyone, let alone inspire academic symposiums.

"When I wrote it [for the Royal National Theatre in London], I thought that no one else would perform it," recalls Frayn, speaking on the phone from his house on the Thames over the holidays. ("It's a relief to sit down and chat rather than the chaos of the grandchildren," the grandfather of eight comments before the interview begins.)

Instead, Copenhagen, even with its seemingly esoteric subject, became both a critical and popular success, transferring to the West End in 1998 and winning several British Best Play of the Year awards. In the years since, its Paris production picked up the Prix Molière and on Broadway it received the Tony Award for Best Play. It has since played around the world, including most of the larger Canadian cities, and opened in Toronto Friday at the Winter Garden.

"I was amazed. I really don't know why people have come to see it," the Booker-nominated novelist and former journalist says with what must be false modesty. "I suppose there is an element of mystery in it -- that's always something that intrigues people."

The mystery of the play surrounds Heisenberg, the nuclear physicist who is best known for his Uncertainty Principle -- that the more accurately you know the position of a particle, the less accurately you know its velocity and vice versa. A pioneer in quantum mechanics, Heisenberg went on to head up Nazi Germany's atomic program.

Copenhagen tries to determine why Heisenberg visited Bohr, who eventually escaped from occupied Denmark and joined the Allies' atomic program in 1941. Was it to warn Bohr about Germany's program, to get intelligence on the Allies' progress in building nuclear weapons, or to try to convince Bohr to join him in working for the Nazis?

"People have disputed what actually occurred ever since," Frayn explains. "At a deeper level, they've disputed what [Heisenberg's] intentions were."

And intentions, Frayn argues in the play, are like the movements of a particle according to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: impossible to pin down. Did Heisenberg purposefully (or, perhaps, unconsciously) sabotage Hitler's attempts to build an atomic bomb, or was he simply unable to figure out how to make one? We will never know for sure, the play suggests.

But this is where the controversy comes in. For some historians, there is little question about Heisenberg's intentions.

Frayn's most ardent critic on this front has been Paul Lawrence Rose, a professor of history and Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University. Since the play's premiere in New York, Rose has taken it on, arguing that Heisenberg was never morally conflicted about building an atomic bomb for the Nazis: The historical record shows Heisenberg was a supporter of Hitler's war aims, particularly on the Eastern Front. In papers and at symposiums, Rose has described Frayn as a Heisenberg apologist and accused him of "subtle revisionism."

Faced with these accusations from a respectable historian, most artists would take what might be termed The Shakespeare Defence: that the play is a work of art and not a work of history, and need be no more accurate than the Bard's portrayal of Richard III.

But Frayn, an amateur historian who has read as much about Heisenberg as anybody else, has not shied away from debate. He argues that those who cast Heisenberg as a one-dimensional villain are guilty of seeing the world in black and white. "Some of the criticism seems misplaced; it is just prejudice," he says.

Frayn defended his balanced and human portrayal of Heisenberg and his participation in the Nazi's nuclear project most clearly in a piece he wrote for the March, 2002, edition of The New York Review of books. "Why shouldn't [Heisenberg] have the same conflicting loyalties and the same mixed motives and emotions that we all have? Why shouldn't he try to juggle principle and expediency, as we all do? Why shouldn't he fear his country's defeat, and its destruction by nuclear weapons? Why shouldn't he lament its ruin and the slaughter of its citizens?"

Still, while Frayn defends his play as it is, he does admit that Copenhagen would be a different play if he was writing it today. Over the past few years, new documents have been released by the families of Bohr and Heisenberg as a direct result of the popularity of the play, documents that shed light on what happened between the scientists in 1941.

"If I was starting again, yes, I would do it slightly differently, but I did it on what was known at the time," Frayn says. He has included information that has emerged since in a postscript to the published edition of his play.

He has made numerous changes to Copenhagen, however, on the advice of the many scientists who have seen the play, fixing several minor mistakes in his explanations of nuclear physics. "Gradually, I've been one by one getting the bugs out," he says. "I'm not a scientist."

Since writing Copenhagen, Frayn has not slowed down. As well as keeping up with new developments in the Heisenberg debate, he has written another cerebral play, Democracy. About Willy Brandt, the chancellor of West Germany in the early 1970s, the play has been critically acclaimed in London and is slated to open on Broadway in the fall.

Frayn has also found time somewhere to write an evening of short comic plays and Spies, which won the 2002 Whitbread Novel of the Year award. (That's the same year his wife, Claire Tomalin, won the Whitbread Book of the Year for her biography of Samuel Pepys.)

"The last few years did seem to be quite fertile," Frayn says in a massive understatement. "From the age of 65 ... It all gets better as you go along."