Big ideas that entertain
RICHARD OUZOUNIAN
THEATRE CRITIC
Copenhagen By Michael Frayn. Directed by Diana Leblanc. Until Feb. 22 at the Winter Garden Theatre, 189 Yonge St. 416-872-1212.
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If you're looking for something to sweep the January
cobwebs from your brain, then let me strongly recommend you pay a visit
to Copenhagen, which opened last night at the Winter Garden Theatre.Michael
Frayn's Tony Award-winning play could not be called light entertainment
by any means, but for the theatregoer who wants to be intellectually
engaged, it's a perfect fit.It tells the story of two physicists
— the Danish Niels Bohr and his German protégé, Werner Heisenberg — who
shared a fateful meeting in Copenhagen on an autumn night in 1941.During
the madness of World War II, the race to create an atomic bomb provided
a deadly undercurrent that only a handful of people in the world were
aware of.Heisenberg seeks out the man to whom he owes most of
his professional life to ask him a question relating to the creation of
just such a bomb, but their meeting ends abruptly.What did
Heisenberg ask Bohr on their evening walk? The facts of their exchange
are not a matter of historical record and so the playwright takes the
matter further, to the court of eternity.In a chilly, timeless
setting by Douglas Paraschuk that manages to suggest the interior of a
nuclear reactor, we find three people trapped for all time —
Heisenberg, Bohr, and Bohr's wife, Margrethe.Not unlike the cast of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit,
they are compelled to relive their pasts in an attempt to discover what
really happened. "It's a chain reaction," Margrethe observes at one
point, "you tell one dreadful truth and it leads to two more."This,
however, is not a conventional play and although some of the
revelations are of the domestic variety, dealing with bruised egos and
lost children, most of the material being discussed is far headier
stuff.Although it may be hard to believe, Frayn succeeds in
taking us through the history of 20th century nuclear physics and
making it come alive, by letting us meet the flesh and blood people who
shaped it.There is exhilaration at first, but later on, the gift
of knowledge becomes a chilling burden, as these scientists realize
that they could offer the military a bomb capable of killing more
people than any other weapon ever known to man.Frayn knows how
to move his focus in and out, so that one moment we're concentrating on
the intimate relationships between the three characters and in the
next, we're contemplating the future of the human race.We
finally arrive at an answer of sorts, through a combination of what
Heisenberg calls "high principles and low calculations, most painfully
hard thought and most painfully childish tears."It takes an
excellent cast to make densely layered material like this work, and
director Diana Leblanc has skilfully put one together.Jim Mezon
is breathtakingly subtle and complex as Heisenberg, letting us see all
the layers of this man as he peels them off for us, onion-like, one by
one. Michael Ball lets the warmth of his personality fill in a
lot of the character of Bohr, but gives us subtle glimpses of the
colder, more selfish side of the man as well.And Martha Henry, as Margrethe, functions as the cosmic referee in this game that no one can ever really win. Her almost godlike detachment is impressive, even more so when she finally lets it shatter to reveal the woman underneath.In
the end, we are deeply moved by this fascinating play that tries to
chronicle "some event that will never quite be located or defined, that
final core of uncertainty at the heart of things."Additional articles by Richard Ouzounian
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