Garlanded with awards, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen transfers impeccably from the National to the West End. Not the least of its virtues is that it shows that out of a three-character, one-set play you can create both intellectually gripping drama and a metaphor for what Lear called 'the mystery of things'.
Frayn's starting-point is the meeting in wartime Denmark between Niels Bohr, Europe's leading quantum theorist, and Werner Heisenberg, his ex-colleague working on the German atomic bomb project. What actually happened? Why was the meeting so brusquely aborted by Bohr? Was Heisenberg seeking information, absolution, endorsement? And why did Heisenberg fail to make the final calculation that would have enabled Germany to develop its own bomb? Out of the uncertainty Frayn builds a brilliant play - one that replays, from the vantage-point of eternity, the endless possibilities of this collision of human particles. Under the watchful eye of Bohr's wife, Margrethe, the two men re-live their encounter, searching for its meaning. What I hadn't fully grasped the first time was Frayn's suggestion that Heisenberg's final mathematical failure stemmed from moral compunction.
The play's balance of emotion and ideas is beautifully captured in Michael Blakemore's production, while the three actors - David Burke as Bohr, Matthew Marsh as Heisenberg and Sara Kestelman as Margrethe - perfectly show the relation between science and character. Some claim to have been blinded by Frayn's science I emerged deeply moved by his simultaneous awareness of life's value and its inexplicable mystery.
Till August 7. Box-office: 0171-494 5076.
