Copenaghen

COPENAGHEN

by Michael Frayn

Theatre director Mauro Avogadro

with Umberto Orsini and Massimo Popolizio and with Giuliana Lojodice

production curated by Compagnia Umberto Orsini e Teatro di Roma – Teatro Nazionale

In co-production with CSS Teatro stabile di innovazione del Friuli Venezia Giulia

Copenhagen is a Historical Drama by Michael Frayn, based on an event that occurred in Copenhagen in 1941, a meeting between the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.  

It is the evening before the explosion of the atomic bomb, and the city is occupied by the Nazis, when the spirits of Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Bohr's wife Margrethe, meet after their deaths to attempt to answer the question that Margrethe poses in the first line of the play, "Why did he [Heisenberg] come to Copenhagen?" They spend the remainder of the two-act drama reliving the experience and presenting, debating and rejecting theories that may answer that question.

Along the way, Heisenberg and Bohr "draft" several versions of their 1941 exchange, arguing about the ramifications of each potential version of their meeting and the motives behind it. They discuss the idea of nuclear power and its control, the rationale behind building or not building an atomic bomb, the uncertainty of the past and the inevitability of the future as embodiments of themselves acting as particles drifting through the atom that is Copenhagen.

An intense and compelling theatrical performance that enclose all the ambiguities which are hidden in the relationship between power, science and morals.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org