In 1941, the German scientist visited Bohr, his old mentor and long-time friend, in Copenhagen. The play's other two characters, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, are involved with Heisenberg in an after-death analysis of an actual meeting that has long puzzled historians. But in his Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn shows us that these men were passionate, philosophical, and all too human, even though one of the three historical figures in his drama, Werner Heisenberg, was the head of the Nazis' effort to develop a nuclear weapon. The popular image of the men who made the bomb is of dispassionate intellects who number-crunched their way towards a weapon whose devastating power they could not even imagine. Was he the victim of an elaborate hoax? By turns comic and profound, The Copenhagen Papers explores the conundrum that is always at the heart of Frayn's work - human gullibility and the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.For most people, the principles of nuclear physics are not only incomprehensible but inhuman.
And Frayn, for his part, lost all sense of certainty. As more material emerged - specifically notes that appeared to give instructions on how to put up a table-tennis table but perhaps containing important encoded information - actor David Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, began to display extreme, even suspicious interest in Frayn's growing obsession with cracking the riddle of the papers. These pages, which she claimed to have found concealed beneath her floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of play. One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, Frayn received a curious package from a suburban housewife, which contained a few faded pages of barely legible German writings.
Heisenberg's intentions on that visit, for good or for evil, have long intrigued and baffled historians and scientists. The subject of the Tony-winning play is the strange visit the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg made to his former mentor, scientist Niels Bohr, in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and the quarrel that ensued. Michael Frayn's Copenhagen has established itself as one of the finest pieces of drama to grace the stage in recent years. In a brilliant coda to the play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn receives mysterious letters that take him back to the theme of his bestselling novel, Headlong - human folly, this time his own.
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