Copenhagen

Written by Michael Frayn

Directed by Diana Leblanc

Starring Michael Ball, Martha Henry and Jim Mezon

At the Winter Garden Theatre

in Toronto

Rating: ***

If history is but an interpretation of the past, then drama is a meditation on the art of interpretation. Even the most committed drama must leave room for doubt, uncertainty and for competing interpretations to co-exist on equal footing if it's to avoid becoming dogma. The multiplicity of interpretations, both hinted at and acted out, in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen is what makes it the riveting and perplexing play that it is.

Though at times its scientific discussions of atomic fissures and neutrons can be off-putting, Copenhagen is a political thriller, a play of ideas, a scientific inquiry and a human drama of lost-but-not-replaced relationships. Its ideas range from the moral implications of science to a deconstruction of scientific claims of purity and objectivity -- in particular, how certain sciences become "racialized," as in the way the Nazis associated theoretical physics with Jewish scientists.

Of one thing, though, we can be certain: In 1941, physicist Werner Heisenberg (Jim Mezon) paid a visit to his mentor Niels Bohr (Michael Ball) and his wife Margrethe (Martha Henry) in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. The two men worked closely in the 1920s, but now find themselves on opposite ends of a political divide. While not a Nazi, Heisenberg chose to stay in Germany and work on its nuclear-physics program. The meeting ended abruptly. What was said? Could it, in a circuitous way, have had an impact on the final outcome of the war? In other words, could the meeting have changed the course of history? One possibility proposed by Frayn is particularly intriguing: Germany's failure to beat the Allied forces to the atomic bomb may have been the result of a (deliberate?) miscalculation on Heisenberg's part.

But it's not all about making sense of the past, and it's just as well that Copenhagen took six years to reach Toronto. In light of the past year -- where the nuclear capability, alleged or real, of Iraq was used in part to justify a war -- Copenhagen gains added topicality. What Frayn has written is therefore a reminder of the present and a warning look at the future. Stylistically, the writing slips in and out of different grammatical tenses -- past, present and a future -- just as the actors constantly navigate and swap positions on stage as if to relive or change the past.

The current Toronto run -- a Mirvish presentation of last year's co-production by Ottawa's National Arts Centre and Halifax's Neptune Theatre -- delivers on the political and philosophical ideas of Frayn, but ultimately, if fittingly, betrays its own uncertainty about them. When I first saw the West End production at the Duchess Theatre in 1999, I recall being struck by the austerity of the plain white set, and by Michael Blakemore's no-frills direction. Director Diana Leblanc and set designer Douglas Paraschuk have opted for a more glitzy, multi-panelled set where scenes and images of floating particles are occasionally projected.

To me, it illustrates a big difference between British and Canadian approaches to direction. While Blakemore put his trust in the text and his cast and, by implication, his audiences, Leblanc feels the need to periodically interrupt the flow of arguments, presumably concerned that we might lose interest and need visual stimulants. The effect is nothing more than an irritating visual distraction and ends in a superfluous theatricality.

And while the performance of Ball initially left me wondering if his overemphasis on Bohr's mumbling, older genial self is a miscalculation, on reflection it's an apt metaphor for an undercurrent of a generational, father-versus-son dynamic -- the human, even Oedipal struggle, from which not even scientific enterprise is free. Henry combines the matronly reserve and potential objectivity of an observer with a slowly percolating emotionalism that finds a powerful release in the second act.

But, as to be expected, Copenhagen belongs to Mezon in yet another of his assured performances, all the more impressive because it's built on the most ambiguously drawn, morally problematic character of the three. Mezon has found possibly the most nuanced interpretation of a moment in Heisenberg's life -- which is all we ask any actor to do.

Copenhagen continues at Toronto's Winter Garden until Feb. 22 (416-872-1212).

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