COPENHAGEN. To 22 November.
Salisbury.
COPENHAGEN
by Michael Frayn.
Salisbury Playhouse To 22 November 2003.
Mon-Wed 7.30pm Thu-Sat 8pm Mat 20,22 November2.30pm.
Audio-described 20 November both performances.
BSL Signed 19 November.
Post Show Talk 18 November.
Runs 2hr 30min One interval.
TICKETS: 01722 32033.
www.salisburyplayhouse.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 November.
A miffed opportunity as the play's specific's are clouded in cotton-wool emotion.
Copenhagen gives audiences time-shifts that move characters between life and afterlife, theoretical physics, history, politics and varying accounts of what happened when German scientist Werner Heisenberg visited Danish scientist Niels Bohr in 1941 Nazi-occupied Copenhagen.
Yet, as the Cottesloe premiere showed, the whole thing can seem crystal-clear while it's being watched. If Salisbury audiences come out feeling the crystal's severely muddied, that has to be put down to this production.
The action unfolds on a bare stage. At the Cottesloe this space was backed by audience members, sitting as if in on an experiment. It's a tricky idea, but logical the play's whole form experiments with what might have happened, what might have been the human motives behind events.
At Salisbury, Gemma Fripp backs the void with occasionally glimpsed piles of papers. This says nothing about the play, which for all its abstractions is very precisely and logically structured.
That's nothing to the fundamental mistake in Douglas Rintoul's direction. Within its logical framework, science can be romantic and exciting. Inspiration's as vital in physics as in literature as is slogging away, trying to get things right.
What's more, scientists are as likely to be excited, suspicious, angry as anyone else. So, it's not surprising the two men's dialogue contains a lot of emotion-linked vocabulary. This is earthed' by Bohr's wife, a part that needs more precise definition than it receives here if Margrethe's to be more than someone standing around eternally worried, perpetually looking as if she ought to be making a pot of tea.
But these people are excited about something specific in their intellectual debate and argument. In Salisbury's production, key emotion' words drive speech, forming amorphous blocks of sound, signifying nothing specific. The shape and substance of argument are lost.
John Arthur and David Phelan become stock types from a 1950s West End drama; troubled head of family, and emotionally-driven son. In a play where direction needs to be pinpoint-precise, they are left to provide sounds that fit the more charged words of their characters' speech but little sense of what goes on in those characters' minds.
Margrethe Bohr: Joanna David.
Niels Bohr: John Arthur.
Werner Heisenberg: David Phelan.
Director: Douglas Rintoul.
Designer: Gemma Fripp.
Lighting: Peter Hunter.
Sound: David Bennion-Pedley.
2003-11-18 00:08:32