Or was he really trying? Scholars have been baffled by the purpose and results of Heisenberg’s visit. Frayn’s play takes place in some great beyond after the death of the protagonists, including a third figure, Bohr’s wife, Margrethe (Blair Brown). The three meet again to try to relive that possibly fateful meeting. Was Heisenberg trying to pump Bohr on the state of Allied research on the atomic bomb? Was he trying to enlist Bohr in an attempt to make sure that both sides would never succeed in making the bomb? Was he, as Margrethe believes, trying to gain “absolution” from his mentor for staying in Germany, unlike so many scientists, especially Jews, who had fled the Nazi regime? The twist is that neither Bohr nor Heisenberg recalls exactly what took place—an ironic application of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that perception is inexact because the object is changed by the very act of perception. So the two act out their meeting again and again, each time with dramatically different results, hoping to snatch the elusive truth from the flux of uncertainty.
Frayn creates riveting suspense and, without dumbing down the dialogue, makes the discussion of matters like quantum physics and matrix mathematics seem like revelations of character. Bosco perfectly embodies the avuncular Bohr; Cumpsty spins like a human electron between arrogance and conscience. Brown’s fierce common sense tries to bring these high-flying minds down to earth. Michael Blakemore’s direction is like a physicist’s probing colliding particles in a cyclotron where the stakes are the fate of humanity. Frayn movingly shows how that fate might have hung on this meeting between, not soldiers or statesmen, but thinkers.
Copenhagen Royal Theater New York Open
