FRIENDSHIP, BRILLIANCE, DOUBT
The universe as a bundle of unknowable of approximates: Relativity and Complementarity, Uncertainty theory, quantum mechanics, particles hanging out in two places at the same time, Schroedinger’s Cat. If you back away from such topics, take heart and return. Michael Frayn’s extraordinary play is rooted in deep humanity and an understanding, both of far intellectual frontiers and the simplicity of friendship. It has no answers. In Michael Longhurst’s production it is brilliantly set by Joanna Scotcher on a double revolve: an arena around infinite waters, with glass bubbles and sharp lanterns randomly reflecting away into infinity and a single pole lamp which – in a moment of frustrated expatiation – young Werner Heisenberg grabs to represent a travelling photon.
Frayn’s imagination, set in an imagined reunion long after both their deaths, deals with the mystery of why in 1941 Heisenberg, a senior German nuclear scientist, visited his old mentor Niels Bohr – “the first of us all, the father of us all”. Bohr is in occupied Denmark: both men are under Gestapo surveillance, able only to talk freely by walking outside. On warring sides, both have reason for suspicion: Bohr might fear the German is part of a programme to harness fission to the first nuclear bomb; Heisenberg might to fishing to find out if his old mentor has contact and knows what the Allies are up to on that fearful project. But they are also old comrades on this barely-imaginable scientific frontier and Margrethe – Bohr’s wife – remembers young Heisenberg as almost a child when he first came, “shy and arrogant and anxious to be loved”. She is the vital third pillar of the play: not a physicist, but an observer of both men and their ways, a citizen under Nazi occupation who is understandably suspicious of Heisenberg turning up out of the blue. Her presence dives into and punctures the human uncertainties of both.
Three times, with the younger man pacing the moving revolve, halting, entering the supposed home, arguing, once grasping the older man’s hands with real emotion, the pair, with sardonic additions from Margrethe, re-examine what happened between them on that autumn day in Copenhagen, before the friendship’s final rift. It draws us into the science but also the human pain: Bohr at one point has to accept that Heisenberg has witnessed savage allied bombings in his homeland, had his shoes burnt off by phosphorus, watched much death. Heisenberg is at times half-defensive about his stance towards the Nazi leadership: he had earlier refused an invitation to emigrate to America to join other Jewish-German nuclear scientists there. There’s at one point a curious suggestion that he maybe even deliberately miscalculated several zeros to suggest that a nuclear bomb couldn’t be made without ruinous resources. To prevent Hitler commissioning one. In their afterlife of course they both know that the Allies did build one: Heisenberg was to har about Hiroshima on the news, later on when he was interned at Farm Hall (worth remembering this play too- https://theatrecat.com/2023/04/04/farm-hall-jermyn-st-theatre-wc1-then-bath/ ).
The casting is fine: Richard Schiff very much the old mentor Bohr, likeable, slightly melancholic, Damien Molony an energetic, pacing, argumentative younger man, Alex Kingston brilliantly evoking Margarethe’s impatient wisdom and anger at an oppressive occupation. The two Nobel winners’ conversations dazzle, sometimes frankly baffle in my case, but the underlying humanity is always visible. It is there both in their questing enthusiasm to know about the infinitesimal atomic world, and in their awareness of how this unprecdented knowledge can be used both for peaceful power and for unspeakable destruction and murder.
Only in imagination and an afterlife can any sort of clarity about such moments be created. Probably only Frayn – philosopher, artist, great and questioning spirit, humble before uncertainty – could have attempted it.
hampsteadtheatre.com to 2 May
Rating 5. And by the way, on more frivolous matters, do not miss the extraordinary new radio play about a hoax surrounding the original premiere of this play – it’s on Radio 4, two parts, also co-written by Frayn himself: CELIA’S SECRET.
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