Copenhagen review – atomic secrets and moral fog in a terrifyingly timely revival

Paapa Essiedu recently spoke of reviving only those plays that speak to the present moment. Michael Frayn’s 1998 drama could not better fit that bill. A dangerous hard-right politician who threatens to wipe out an entire civilisation sits at the heart of this three-hander about pioneering atomic physics caught in the warp of political violence and warfare. It is based on a real life meeting in 1941 between the Danish Niels Bohr (Richard Schiff) and the German Werner Heisenberg (Damien Molony), both brilliant quantum scientists on opposite sides during the second world war. The raging leader here is Hitler but echoes of Donald Trump could not be more resounding, given his recently expressed fantasy of genocide in his war with Iran. Those chilling echoes make Michael Longhurst’s production extremely relevant (it also chimes with the play in the theatre’s downstairs space, ROI (Return on Investment), also about the morality of science). It is a handsome production, the dense science-talk in the play’s second half is made clear (it is nowhere near as impenetrable as Tom Stoppard’s recently revived Arcadia at the Old Vic theatre), yet it does not always manage to lay bare the metaphors and bigger meanings of the science. Tension comes and goes, the dialogue not quite drawing out the characters’ emotional torments which lie beneath the surface, such as in Heisenberg’s speech about his flawed, but nonetheless beloved, German “motherland”. The chemistry between the men is not quite there either. Bohr was 16 years Heisenberg’s senior and had once been his tutor. By the time they met, both had received Nobel prizes. Here the age gap seems too wide and this tempers the dynamic between them, undermining the tension. Heisenberg looks puppyish, like an angsty university student, while Bohr appears too much the retired professor (Schiff unfortunately trips over his lines, repeatedly). They do not have the intimacy or friction of friends, competitors or rivals. Alex Kingston at …