"Copenhagen"

[fiefoe]

One of Michael Frayn's other plays, "Noises Off" is also about replaying of scenes from different angles. This one though, is not playing for farce but that 'that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things' and what-ifs.

• It’s like being in a dream. You can never quite focus the precise details of the scene around you. At the head of the table—is that Bohr? I turn to look, and it’s Bohr, it’s Rozental, it’s Moller, it’s whoever I appoint to be there.
• It’s like trying to remember who was at that lunch you gave me at the Institute. Around the table sit all the different explanations for everything I did.
• Margrethe  No.
  Bohr  No? What do you mean, no?
  Margrethe  Not together. You didn’t do any of those things together.
• Heisenberg  We should all have met in Zürich … Bohr  In September 1939.
• Younger than Christian would have been now.

The historical background:

• That’s what the Nazis called him. He taught relativity, and they said it was Jewish physics.
• ...was always regarded in Germany as inferior to experimental physics, and the theoretical chairs and lectureships were the only ones that Jews could get.
• Bohr  Germany’s changed. Heisenberg  Yes. Then we were down. And you could be generous.
• Even the puddles in the streets are burning. They’re puddles of molten phosphorus. It gets on your shoes like some kind of incandescent dog-muck—I have to keep scraping it off—as if the streets have been fouled by the hounds of hell.
• Heisenberg  Yes, because at last we were free of all constraints! The nearer the end came the faster we could work!
  Bohr  You were no longer running that programme, Heisenberg. The programme was running you.
• Margrethe  I thought there were no German patrol-boats that night?
  Bohr  No—the whole squadron had suddenly been reported unseaworthy.