Smart Bomb

by Toby Zinman

CopenhagenThrough Sun., May 5, Forrest Theatre, 1114 Walnut St., 800-447-7400

One of the most intriguing and difficult plays in years, Copenhagen is theater as science and science as politics. It explores the principles of uncertainty and complementarity (known as the Copenhagen Interpretation), using physics to explore friendship and friendship to explore physics. The play teaches the audience as it goes along, so that we “get it,” although you need to pay serious attention. Lots of foolish people left at intermission, missing Act 2, when all that you’ve learned in Act 1 pays off.

Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were two of the great atomic physicists who invented the 20th century. If Einstein was God, Bohr was the Pope; but who was Heisenberg?

In 1941, when Copenhagen was occupied by the Nazis, Heisenberg, the most important German scientist still in Germany (most of the other great physicists were Jews and had left by then), visited his Danish mentor; this is historical fact. What did they talk about? Nobody knows. Was Heisenberg working on an atomic bomb for Hitler? Was he trying to sabotage the success of his own experiments? Did he miscalculate or fail to calculate the crucial mathematics? Playwright Michael Frayn takes up all these questions, and he has his characters play out varying answers again and again.

As directed by Michael Blakemore -- or at least he directed the premiere production in London in 1998 and the New York production in 2000, and his name is listed as director in this production -- the actors sit or walk on a bare, wooden, circular stage. Each of the three characters (Margrethe, Bohr's wife, is the crucial third) seems to become part of an atom; everybody gets a chance to play nucleus, everybody gets to tell his or her own version of the meeting and of their relationships.

I hate it when critics say stuff like this, but I must: This touring show, despite the superficial similarities to the New York production, seems shallow. It lacks both depth and crisp precision. Even the lighting, which I had found thrilling before (the stage was washed in warm light when Bohr spoke, in cool blues when Heisenberg spoke), seems compromised. Here, the frequent lighting changes just seem random and distracting.

Len Cariou as Bohr has nothing resembling European warmth and avuncular wisdom; he seems to feel obliged to punch the word "Nazi" every time he utters it. As Heisenberg, Hank Stratton is a clean-cut cartoon, erasing all the subtle ambiguities of the central puzzle of the play. Mariette Hartley is charming but never conveys the immense intelligence and emotional complexity of the woman who was Bohr's wife.

Copenhagen is a remarkable play, but this production is less remarkable than it deserves.

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