COPENHAGEN. To 14 October.

Watford

COPENHAGEN
by Michael Frayn

Palace Theatre To 14 October 2006
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Wed 2.30pm & Sat 3pm
Audio-described 14 Oct 3pm
Stagetext 10 Oct
Post-show discussion 10 Oct
Runs 2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS: 01923 225671
www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 October 2006

Don’t be blinded by the science; this is a play about people.
Theoretical physicists should have a ball at this play. They’ll know almost as much about the subject as playwright Michael Frayn seems to, though the point of his play is uncertainty, specifically about what happened on a walk in September 1941 when German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg visited his colleague Niels Bohr in Copenhagen.

Bohr, 16 years the elder, had assumed a father-like role towards Heisenberg since their first meeting in 1922. The German Heisenberg was then a member of the nation defeated in war. Nineteen years later, the son’s outgrown his father as a member of the Master Race. Denmark had become a conquered country, and the Jewish Bohr was vulnerable. The colleagues are simultaneously friends and enemies. They’re both thorough researchers. Yet, as atomic weaponry teeters towards existence through their discoveries, destinies can rest on a remark made or withheld - by chance, or from an unknowable motive.

Frayn replays possibilities about the 1941 meeting by placing the characters in an afterlife limbo, reflecting on events, still (and in Matthew Lloyd’s striking production, more than ever) heated over motives and relationships. Ruari Murchison supplies a bare, experimental chamber with reflective sides, intensifying the final section where the observer’s inability to observe themself becomes key.

Just 3 chairs occupy the stage, yet the action never becomes static or monotonous as Lloyd and his cast match the swirl of Frayn’s dialogue. It’s only when, for a time post-interval, lines belt vehemently along that a suspicion of generalising arises, of sound and fury taking over from significance and meaning.

But mainly these are aptly-contrasted performances, Tom Smith’s excitable young Heisenberg darting emotionally about, voice protesting while Jack Klaff’s magisterial, pipe-smoking Bohr can have a dream-like quality, deliberate and thoughtful. Between them, Kate Fahy as Bohr’s intelligent wife (she’s picked up a lot from typing his manuscripts) argues the human perspective.

Which is what matters. As the play says, Elsinore Castle acquires a new dimension from being (the fictional) Hamlet’s home. So apparent fictions interrelate with facts, impossibilities and uncertainties collide to revivify debates about human experience in this sparkling, brightly-revived play.

Margrethe: Kate Fahy
Bohr: Jack Klaff
Heisenberg: Tom Smith

Director: Matthew Lloyd
Designer: Ruari Murchison
Lighting: Matthew Eagland
Composer: Richard Taylor

2006-10-04 11:16:56