BILL BRAY considers our next production
It takes a remarkable writer to put science on stage. Of course, there is science fiction but let us be serious! The physicist, politician and novelist, CP Snow, provoked widespread and heated debate when, in 1959, his lecture and publication of The Two Cultures highlighted the gulf between the arts and sciences. Playwright and novelist Michael Frayn, however, is a truly remarkable writer who does not shrink from the issue of scientific examination but this does not mean that his plays are heavy and difficult; he also has written the funniest play about backstage life in Noises Off, which won him his fourth Evening Standard Award as Best Comedy of the Year (in 1982).
Copenhagen discusses science through the meeting of the German, Werner Heisenberg who travelled to Denmark in 1941 to discuss scientific developments with his former friend and colleague, Niels Bohr. Its paramount importance is that the discussion was not about any old scientific development but about nuclear fission, which had major implications for who might develop and use a weapon of mass destruction in the war taking place as they met.
Frayn's play is a 'whodunnit' with all the excitement that the word conveys. The audience discovers not just something about the historical event that took place in Denmark more than sixty years ago, but also something about human nature and the multi-layered relationships between Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Bohr's wife Margrethe. Hailed as an imaginative and fascinating re-creation of the historical meeting, Copenhagen earned Best Play honours at the 1998 Evening Standard Awards. It is, in short, a fascinating play and this was recognised by a GWT member when she saw the original National Theatre production in 1998. Jean Stewart wrote congratulating the GWT on its Golden Anniversary production of King Lear. Her letter, in Whitwords Vol.20 No.10 (June/July 1998) adds a postcript asking whether anyone had earmarked Copenhagen for future production. It takes a bit of time for a new play to get from the stage of the National to the GWT but, finally, Jean Stewart has her wish. And you can join her in the audience for a remarkable play.
COLIN YARDLEY introduces the characters
Michael Frayn has put real historical figures on the stage and we have to re-create them, helped most of all by the evidence of the text and also by biographies and histories of the period.
"So what was Bohr?" This is Heisenberg's rhetorical question near the beginning of the play. "He was the first of us all ... modern atomic physics began when Bohr realised that quantum theory applied to matter as well as to energy. 1913. Everything we did was based on that great insight of his." The miniature solar system model of the atom was Bohr's idea: electrons in orbit around a central nucleus, as understood nowadays by every cohort of 16-year olds in the country.
The 1920s and 1930s saw enormous advances in the understanding of the structure of the atom. Physicists and chemists all over the world freely exchanged their discoveries and hotly debated every development. Central to this fast-moving and exciting research were Albert Einstein in Berlin, Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Werner Heisenberg, firstly working alongside Bohr and then in Leipzig. It was the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 - the splitting of the uranium nucleus into two other elements, with the release of an enormous quantity of energy, the theory of which was worked out by Bohr and others - which led governments to impose the utmost secrecy on nuclear research. The inspiring period of international collaboration was over. The next step was the atomic bomb and the following step was the Cold War and the MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, era.
Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize a year after Einstein, was brilliant, but modest, cautious and rigorous in his scientific work and most encouraging in all his dealings with his younger colleagues. In 1933, when he visited the USA for the first time, he shocked his hosts by his admiration for the culture of the American Indians and left them gasping with his recommendation for the amelioration of the effects of the depression: "One can't improve conditions for all levels of society without renunciation on the part of some."
At a scientific conference shortly after Munich, the promulgation of the Nazis' race laws and Goering's description of Czechs and Jews as "pygmies and Jew devils", Bohr said in a speech, in his characteristically cerebral way: "It is entirely a caprice of fate that the culture of another people is theirs and not ours and that ours is not theirs ...it is the gradual removal of prejudices which is the common aim of all sciences." The German delegates walked out.
In 1943, after escaping from occupied Denmark to Sweden, then England and America, he joined the Manhattan Project, working on the application of nuclear energy to the construction of weapons. He, like Einstein, had pointed out that harnessing the atom would require gigantic industrial resources. He visited Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where, spread over 80 square miles, there were massive installations for separating uranium-235 and plutonium, the most energy-rich fissionable elements.
In 1944, more than a year before the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, Bohr was making efforts to warn the US and British governments that a post-war world with nuclear weapons would see "a vicious arms race in which the United States and Great Britain would first enjoy a precarious and uneasy advantage," following which more and more countries would acquire a nuclear capability. This might lead to the destruction of the entire world. Bohr's representations to President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were to no avail. As Margrethe Bohr says in the play: "When all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?"
While Bohr was at Los Alamos, working on the Allies' bomb project, Heisenberg, his one-time assistant and favourite colleague, was leading the Nazis' nuclear weapons programme. Heisenberg was never a Nazi supporter, but his passionate nationalism led him to back his country, right or wrong. While Bohr led an international committee for the resettlement of Jewish refugee scientists escaping Hitler's persecution, Heisenberg stayed in Germany and said not a word. With a formidable intellect, great arrogance, total commitment to his science and personal advancement, Heisenberg was either blind to what was going on around him in Germany, or chose not to see.
Did he travel to Copenhagen in 1941 in order to find out what Bohr knew about the Allies' nuclear programme? Or did he aim, as he later claimed, to win Bohr to the idea of both sides abandoning the idea of developing the ultimate horror weapon? Or was he hoping to pick Bohr's brains about how to make the bomb?
Margrethe does not trust him. She and Niels had six sons of their own, one dying at ten from complications of meningitis and one at nineteen in a sailing accident. Unlike Bohr, she never accepted Heisenberg as a surrogate son. She is the sceptical commentator in our play. The wise voice of everyman.
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