Overview
ne day during the run of Michael Fryan's play Copenhagen, a curious
letter arrived from a housewife in Chiswick. She enclosed a few faded
pages of barely legible German which she thought might have some
relevance to the mystery at the play's heart. They turned out to mark
the start of a long and winding trail. The subject of
Copenhagen is the strange visit that the German physicist, Werner
Heisenberg, made to his former Danish colleague, Niels Bohr in 1941. The
two old friends now found themselves on opposite sides in a world war,
and Heisenberg could not explain to Bohr that he was running the Nazis'
secret atomic programme. His intentions have intrigued and baffled
historians, and the hitherto unpublished German documents which Celia
Rhys-Evans now began to send Michael Frayn cast a remarkable new light
on certain aspects of the story. The gradual emergence of these
papers was followed with particularly close interest by the actor, David
Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, and who had happened to have a wide
experience of documents of this sort. When it was all over David Burke
and Michael Frayn sat down together, rather as Bohr and Heisenberg do in
the play, to try to unravel the mystery, and, like Bohr and Heisenberg,
to confront once again the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what
we do.