Copenhagen
Michael Frayn
Copenhagen
In 1941, at the height of the Second World War, German physicist Werner Heisenberg travelled to Copenhagen to visit his friend, collegue and mentor Niels Bohr. But with Denmark under Nazi occupation, Heisenberg leading the German nuclear programme and the half-Jewish Bohr one of the leading experts on atomic physics, the question is - why did he come?
3.7 out of 5 based on 3 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Location |
Edinburgh |
| Venue |
Royal Lyceum |
| Director |
Tony Cownie |
| Cast |
Owen Oakeshott (Heisenberg), Sally Edwards (Margrethe) Tom Mannion (Bohr) |
| From |
April 2009 |
| Until |
May 2009 |
| Box Office |
0131-248 4848 |
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In 1941, at the height of the Second World War, German physicist Werner Heisenberg travelled to Copenhagen to visit his friend, collegue and mentor Niels Bohr. But with Denmark under Nazi occupation, Heisenberg leading the German nuclear programme and the half-Jewish Bohr one of the leading experts on atomic physics, the question is - why did he come?
Reviews
The Scotsman
Joyce McMillan
"Frayn marshals all the new vocabulary of modern particle physics, both in his text and in the looping, colliding structure of the drama, to reimagine – not once, but four times, in ever-tightening spirals – exactly how that meeting might have gone, and how it may have changed the whole course of human history. Sixty years on, the ghosts of Bohr and Heisenberg – and, crucially, of Bohr's intelligent and supportive wife, Margrethe – gather to remember the events of the evening; they never achieve a final version, but they leave us with a powerful, thrilling, and at times almost mystical sense of how tiny shifts of time, chance, decision or fate, can have an impact beyond calculation."
23/04/2009
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The Stage
Thom Dibdin
"Wordy and intense, Michael Frayn’s dramatisation of the 1941 visit by Werner Heisenberg to his old mentor Niels Bohr in Copenhagen at first seems to lend itself to the ears. Under Tony Cownie’s deliberately paced direction however, as the tempo builds with the emotion of the interaction between the two men, this quickly becomes a thing of the stage."
23/04/2009
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The Guardian
Mark Fisher
"At its best, as in the tremendous rallies between Tom Mannion's Bohr and Owen Oakeshott's Heisenberg in Tony Cownie's production, the play is a dazzling drama of ideas, headily matching concepts about splitting the atom with a debate about taking moral responsibility for one's actions. At its worst, in those moments when the actors seem dwarfed by designer Neil Murray's set of outsize control rods, it is a play in which the physicists tell each other what they must already know, while Sally Edwards, as Bohr's wife, chips in like a character from an arch sitcom."
27/04/2009
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