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A review by danilanglie
Copenhagen by Michael Frayn
3.5
I remember reading this in undergrad, freshman year, which was... oh gosh... 12 years ago now, and being being super blown away by it. It definitely left an impression on me, and when I later tried to write a one-act play with some friends, I can see how this play and Arcadia, something else I read that first year in college, imprinted on me. The idea of retelling the same scene again and again, trying to find the right way for the scene to play out, relitigating faulty memories, worrying over the past and its implications again and again... I love that as a theme and how it plays out here. I bet this is an electrifying story to see on stage in the hands of talented actors.
But in terms of the content, I kind of think it ends up being a pretty facile moral argument. This idea of... did Heisenberg intentionally delay the German effort to build an atomic bomb, or did he unintentionally delay it out of subconscious guilt, or did he really try very hard and just fail... like, don't get me wrong, it's certainly a chilling sliding doors question for the history books, but the central conceit, the idea that there was something fateful about this meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941, just doesn't really bear out.
I think my favorite aspect is the moments where the three characters are all telling the audience that they know what the others are thinking, reflecting in a circle around things that cannot be changed: namely, the death by drowning of Niels and Margrethe's son, or certain conversations they had, the order in which things were discovered, who's to get credit and why it matters.
Irrespective of the actual plot and questions being asked, to me this is a play that's about memory and guilt. What can we trick our own brains into believing, in order to assuage our sense of responsibility? Or, if we already feel guilty, how do we dig ourselves deeper into that guilt by making the world revolve around us?
It's also, of course, quite cleverly a play about physics. I don't want to undersell the cleverness of the uncertainty principle and how it's portrayed as metaphor here. There is something true and haunting about the fact that we can't see ourselves as well as we see other people, we can't observe ourselves perfectly, or if we try, we lose the grip on what we're thinking about and trying to accomplish.
I am ultimately really glad I revisited this, even if it didn't knock my socks off the way I remember it doing in school!
But in terms of the content, I kind of think it ends up being a pretty facile moral argument. This idea of... did Heisenberg intentionally delay the German effort to build an atomic bomb, or did he unintentionally delay it out of subconscious guilt, or did he really try very hard and just fail... like, don't get me wrong, it's certainly a chilling sliding doors question for the history books, but the central conceit, the idea that there was something fateful about this meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941, just doesn't really bear out.
I think my favorite aspect is the moments where the three characters are all telling the audience that they know what the others are thinking, reflecting in a circle around things that cannot be changed: namely, the death by drowning of Niels and Margrethe's son, or certain conversations they had, the order in which things were discovered, who's to get credit and why it matters.
Irrespective of the actual plot and questions being asked, to me this is a play that's about memory and guilt. What can we trick our own brains into believing, in order to assuage our sense of responsibility? Or, if we already feel guilty, how do we dig ourselves deeper into that guilt by making the world revolve around us?
It's also, of course, quite cleverly a play about physics. I don't want to undersell the cleverness of the uncertainty principle and how it's portrayed as metaphor here. There is something true and haunting about the fact that we can't see ourselves as well as we see other people, we can't observe ourselves perfectly, or if we try, we lose the grip on what we're thinking about and trying to accomplish.
I am ultimately really glad I revisited this, even if it didn't knock my socks off the way I remember it doing in school!