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Copenhagen
In “Copenhagen” Michael Frayn achieves the impossible;
he makes physics fascinating to the non-scientist.
 Frayn does this by
creating dramatic tension between Danish atomic physicist Niels Bohr and
his former star pupil, German scientist Werner Heisenberg as they meet
again, after a number of years, in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen during World
War II. Heisenberg, after a father-son relationship with Bohr, had written
as the war began in 1939, thanking Bohr and ending the friendship.
History knows that Heisenberg visited Bohr in 1941, when both the Germans
and the allies were working on the atom bomb, but no one knows what was
discussed. The play dramatizes what might have happened at the meeting,
giving the audience different versions from which to choose.
Frayn’s mind-gripping drama asks, but never answers,
many questions: How responsible were the scientists for their equations
used to created the atomic bomb and its mass destruction of Hiroshima as
well as its threat of annihilation of the world? Did they consider at the
time the moral implications or only the political ones of winning the war?
How much did the Nazis know about the atomic bomb and how close were they
to producing one of their own? Was Heisenberg sent by the Nazis to visit
Bohr and pry out of him the last equation needed by them to make their own
bomb?
Time is flexible as the play moves back and forth in
time. It opens in the present, with the characters dead and looking back to
the meeting, which then ensues. Dead, Heisenberg after the bomb has been
dropped, is able to arrive at equations that he says evaded him during the
war. Might some moral compunction have contributed to his earlier delay in
progressing towards the necessary equation?
Under Michael Blakemore's direction, the action is
never static because the conflict between the two men is sustained
throughout, conflict which is not physical but intellectual. Expertly
enacted by William Brand as the German, David Baron as the Dane, and
Corinna Marlowe as his wife Margarethe, they achieve the necessary
excitement to keep the audience intrigued -- even though we know the
outcome: the Nazis did not get the bomb (their persecution of the Jews led
to Einstein's flight to America) and it was created and dropped by the
U.S., winning the war and assuming the guilt. When the scientists agree to
use “plain talk” for Margarethe’s benefit, her comments and questions
clarify scientific principles for the audience. Thus we leave the theater
feeling not only cleverer than when we entered, but also exhilarated by the
give-and-take of the arguments as they in turn enlisted our rejection and
our sympathy.
On an almost bare stage in the shape of a circle with
three chairs, the action moves freely from indoors to outdoors and the
famous walk that we know the two engaged in while discussing and
disagreeing. For this the circle is perfect, just as it is a metaphor for
the arguments for and against the bomb, which over the past half-century
have, like a circle, been endless.
Some historians believe that Heisenberg paid his visit
to find out how far along the allies were with developing the bomb; others
believe that he was attempting to find out information from Bohr that would
allow the Germans to progress with their own creation of the atom bomb on
which they were working. (Bohr later would be one the physicists working
in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was successfully developed).
Throughout, Mr. Frayn never loses sight of the human
element – the emotions involved over the loss of the Bohrs’ son, or the
destruction of the men’s long friendship, or Margarethe’s protectiveness of
her husband. Personal feelings common to all are finely balanced with
scientific arguments that have moral and philosophical implications.
The “uncertainty principle,” discovered by Heisenberg when
young, gives rise to different versions of what happened that night. The
playwright notes that the play’s psychological uncertainty is parallel to
the uncertainty theory that we can never know everything about an object or
an event: “Can we have absolute knowledge of anyone’s intentions?”
(Duchess Theatre, Catherine Street. London W2)
Note: “Copenhagen” opened in New York the following
season, with Philip Bosco as Bohr, Michael Crumpsty as Heisenberg, and
Blair Brown as Margarethe. There is a BBC television version, shown on
PBS, with Stephen Rea as Bohr, Daniel Craig as Heisenberg, and Francesca
Annis as Margarethe, adapted and directed by Howard Davies.
Noises Off
They’re Rolling in the Aisles
Michael Frayn’s farce about a farce has proved so
popular in its revival at London’s National
 Theatre that it has moved to
the Piccadilly Theatre and is scheduled for a visit to New York in
September. “Noises Off” begins with an all-night rehearsal of a farce
called “Nothing On” by a touring company in Weston-super-Mare. Frayn,
whose recent success “Copenhagen” gave audiences something to think about,
now gives them something to laugh about: the chaos that is always lurking
as we attempt to impose order on disorder. If a prop is lacking, a cue
misplaced, or timing off, chaos reigns.
“Getting on, getting off,” laments Lloyd Dallas
(Peter Egan) the worn-out director of “Nothing On,” “Doors and sardines.
That’s farce, that’s the theater, that’s life,” he declares from the
stalls, where he is desperately trying to achieve the semblance of a comedy
onstage while the clock ticks towards the opening hour.
In the first act, in the cast’s final rehearsal,
everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Lines are confused, entrances
clash with exits, as the housekeeper Dotty (Lynn Redgrave) is dashing about
with a plate of sardines and hoping for a quiet afternoon off watching
television while the master is away. He returns unexpectedly, to no one’s
surprise except the characters in the farce, who include a rental agent and
his bimbo girlfriend (stripping off and hoping to use the bedroom), and
assorted burglars and sheiks.
A month later, with the performance seen from
backstage, the actors are developing in their personal lives a more
interesting and equally involved plot. The juvenile lead is having an
affair with Dotty and is insanely jealous, even to wielding a fire axe,
when he finds her in what seems like a compromising position. With the back
of the set facing us, the actors scramble with stuck doors, misplaced props
and costumes, actors’ temperamentally refusing to appear or disappearing
due to drink. The director turns up backstage, taking a brief respite from
directing “Richard III” elsewhere (his lead has a back problem) to patch
things up with the juvenile actress he is romancing. Her contact lenses
keep dropping out into inconvenient landing spots.
In act three, seen from the front, we view the final
performance of the provincial tour of “Nothing On”. Hilariously for those
unacquainted with theater production and even more amusing for those who
are, the play is virtually unrecognizable. Lines are made up or rephrased
by the actors, cues are missed, improvisation is rampant, props and even
the sets are destroyed.
Under Jeremy Sams’ direction, this
cast must be impeccable in their timing, and never miss a cue, all of which
they perform to perfection as the less than perfect but very human members
of the touring cast. Frayn’s inventiveness builds laugh upon
laugh, and as with all good farces, we enjoy the mishaps because they
reflect the human condition.
(Piccadilly Theatre, Denman Street, W1V 8DY. Phone:
020-7369-1744.)
Democracy
Michael Frayn’s Democracy
at Wyndham's Theatre in London is complex, entertaining, and intellectually
stimulating, dealing with West German Chancellor Willy Brandt
and the East German spy who loved him, Gunter Guillaume.
Opening with Brandt’s election in 1969, it manages to break
down complicated historical events (as did Frayn’s “Copenhagen”)
by focusing on its two main characters, so different in their
public persona and yet sharing similar emotions in their inner
lives of alienation. And as we left “Copenhagen” feeling
we knew more about nuclear physics than when we entered the theater,
so we now learn about Brandt and his struggles to reconcile East
and West Germany in the years before the Wall came down. Frayn
reminds us that the play is “fiction. . . .[that] does take
its rise from the historical record.”
The politics are familiar. Having achieved office, the leader
whose goal is peace – here, between the east and west of
his divided country -- also must maintain a working relationship
between the politicians of the diverse coalition that elected
him. Chief among them is conniving older cynic Herbert Wehner
(David Ryall) and suave Helmut Schmidt (Glyn Grain), all-too-ready
to take over as chancellor. As the office boy, running errands,
filing, volunteering to water the plants, describing himself as
“nobody,” is East German spy Gunter Guillaume. At
first, Brandt wants Gunter fired: “Herr Guillaume…carries
ordinariness a little too far;” he tells administrator Reinhard
(Paul Gregory), “find me someone else.” But eventually,
Brandt comes to depend upon the smiling, obsequious spy who eagerly
reports everything to his Stasi controller, Arno, seated at a
café table at stage left throughout the action. And during
the four years of their association, Gunter rises to become Brandt’s
personal assistant, who admires and defends him, even as his every
move is reported to the Stasi. Gunter also rises in the estimation
of his spymasters, who come to regard him as “the jewel
in the crown” of their network.
Mr. Frayn states that the play’s theme is “the complexity
of human arrangements and human beings themselves and the difficulties
this creates in both shaping and understanding our actions.”
Brilliantly performed by Roger Allam,  Brandt
is indeed complex: charismatic and visionary, yet given to bouts
of depression and despair, a head of state who is indecisive,
who sends crowds into raptures yet who is unsure which of his
persona – he had many aliases while hiding in Norway from
the Gestapo – is the real one. Conleth Hill (last seen playing
multiple roles in “Stones in His Pockets”) is perfect
as Guilllaume, the clever servant who rises from “gofer”
to personal assistant, with just the right combination of contempt
for the “chief” and adulation that approaches love.
Like Mephistopheles, he encourages Brandt’s womanizing,
tempting him to excess. He revels in his dual roles – interrupting
a confidence from Brandt to joyously report it to his pale, humorless
controller, well played by Steven Pacey.
In one scene, as the two travel together on the chancellor’s
special train, Guillaume points out to Brandt that they are alike
in being fatherless, and in both having teen-aged sons named Peter
and Pierre. Brandt confides to his aide the many identities he
assumed while hiding in Norway: “I could have been a spy.
Might be one, for all you know. Might be spying now.” Yet
in a poignant passage, he relates how as a schoolboy abandoned
by his father he left Germany to assume other names, other roles,
until nothing remained but the school cap of the lost boy Herbert
Frahm: “The boy I might have been, and never was.”
Developing the metaphor of the journey and the quest, he compares
himself to “a suitcase with a series of false bottoms.”
Director Michael Blakemore keeps the action moving rhythmically,
preserving the tension, the irony, and the humor. Even the split-level
set by Peter J. Davison symbolizes complexity, with its row upon
row of pigeonholes against the office walls and a twisting spiral
staircase between the levels. The upper level that sees Brandt
idolized by a cheering crowd also serves as the locale for a crumpled
leader sunk deep in depression.
The bumbling of intelligence officers is nothing new: Brandt’s
own undercover men are unable to discover the mole in their midst
because they misinterpret
the clues they have possessed for nearly four years. When they
finally unravel the obvious, Guillaume is arrested. He declares
on the spot that he is indeed a citizen of East Germany. What
brings Brandt down, though, is the detailed account of his womanizing
kept by his own intelligence agents and their fear that Guillaume,
now exposed and jailed, might possess additional material about
these liaisons – like photographs – with which to
blackmail the government. It is this fear that prompts the resignation
of Brandt, the man who contributed so much to reuniting his country
by replacing hatred and mistrust between East and West through
preaching reconciliation and compassion. Even as Guillaume cries
out from his cell that he never betrayed Brandt, “not me,
chief, not me,” he takes comfort in realizing that their
names will be linked in history: “wherever he goes, my shadow
goes with him, together still.”
Just as Brandt uses gestures, not words, to mark occasions of
import, like kneeling to ask forgiveness of holocaust victims,
so dialogue is absent from the play’s finale. A sound of
chipping away, described first as termites, becomes louder and
louder, until it crescendos into a resounding crash, as the Berlin
Wall comes down.
Performances at Wyndham's Theatre, Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0DA.
Phone: 0870 060 6633
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