Michael Frayn - The Copenhagen Papers

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Contents

The authors wish to thank Petra Abendroth for her contribution to this book.

PROLOGUE

Michael Frayn

It was a long war for the original London cast of my play Copenhagen. The three of themDavid Burke, Sara Kestelman, and Matthew Marshplayed it from May 1998 until August 1999, first in repertory at the National Theatre for nine months, then straight into the West End to do seven performances a week at the Duchess for another six months. Its a play that makes great demands upon its small cast. All three of them are onstage virtually throughout the evening, discovering quantum mechanics and developing nuclear fission, then exploring some of the philosophical darknesses of the human mind.

On the August night that they finally came to the end of their grueling tour of duty, we all went out to dinner afterward to celebrate. They had certainly earned a celebration, but they must have been almost too tired to enjoy it, like exhausted troops returning from the front, and they must have felt that the rest of us thereMichael Codron, who produced the play in the West End, and who was giving us the dinner; Michael Blakemore, who directed the production; and Icould never share what they had been through. We had been left behind, the staff officers who had sent the troops into battle, then spent the war in safety and idleness many miles behind the front line.

In spite of all this, David Burke and I, at any rate, spent the evening in the most animated conversation. But then he and I had a great deal to talk about, and a second cause for celebration. For us the evening marked the end not just of his stint at the front but of another long trailand a rather more bewildering one for both of us.

Like me, David is in his mid-sixties, and though wed never worked together before I had admired him for a long time, from when I first saw him in the original production of Alan Ayckbourns Absurd Person Singular in 1973, to his most recent appearance as Kent in Richard Eyres fine production of Lear at the Nationala great arc of career spanning nearly thirty years and the whole range of English theatre, from the funniest of comedies to the most harrowing of tragedies. His performance as the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in my play had been quite remarkable, and his incarnation of Bohrs celebrated combination of percipience and innocence, of toughness and lovability, had moved me deeply. It was not his acting that we were talking about, however, nor, for that matter, the riches of wisdom and experience that we must both have accumulated in the course of our long lives. We were talking about the contents of the large brown envelope on the floor between our two chairs. We were discussing the mysterious batch of papers whose gradual emergence over the previous months had preoccupied us both almost as intensely as the play had.

The subject of Copenhagen, I should explain, is itself a mysterythe strange visit that the German physicist Werner Heisenberg paid to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. They were old friends and colleagues, but Denmark was now under German occupation, and Heisenberg had become an enemy. Though he couldnt say it openly to Bohr, he had also become the head of the Nazi governments nuclear program. The two men had a private conversation that ended abruptly and angrily, and their great friendship along with it, but no one has ever been able to reconstruct what they said to each other, or to agree on what Heisenbergs intentions were in making his unwelcome but evidently pressing visit.

The papers in the large brown envelope at our feet related to a later chapter in the story, when Heisenberg, together with all the other German physicists who had been involved in atomic research, was rounded up by the British at the end of the war and secretly interned for six months in Farm Hall, a country house on the outskirts of Godmanchester, in Huntingdonshire. It was another bizarre episode. As Heisenberg had now told Bohr 299 times in the play:

Our families in Germany are starving, and there are we sitting down each evening to an excellent formal dinner with our charming host, the British officer in charge of us. Its like a pre-war house-partyone of those house-parties in a play, thats cut off from any contact with the outside world, where you know the guests have all been invited for some secret sinister purpose. No one knows were thereno one in England, no one in Germany, not even our families. But the wars over. Whats happening? Perhaps, as in a play, were going to be quietly murdered, one by one. In the meanwhile its all delightfully civilised. I entertain the party with Beethoven piano sonatas. Major Rittner, our hospitable gaoler, reads Dickens to us, to improve our English.

Did these things really happen to me? wonders Heisenberg in astonishment as he recalls them. They certainly did, because the events at Farm Hall, unlike those in Copenhagen, are most thoroughly documented. The house had been comprehensively bugged by British Intelligence, who made recordings of the German scientists unguarded conversations among themselves in order to find out, presumably, how much they had discovered about building an atomic bomb. The transcripts of these recordings were kept secret by the British government until 1992, when they were at last pried loose by a combined task force of historians and scientists, and finally published.

The papers in the envelope, however, were something else againa completely new source of information about Farm Halland they cast an astonishing new light on the story. Now that David was free from the distracting pressures of those seven mighty performances a week, I suggested to him that we should collaborate to write a brief account of the documents, and of the way in which they had come to light, taking turns to explain how each of us had been involved at each separate stage. He agreed.

So here it is, laid out rather like the dialogue in a play. MF speaks first; DB speaks second; and we shall both have a lot more to say to each other before we are through. Its a bit like a play in other ways as well: the story falls neatly into two acts, each neatly rounded off by a celebratory dinner, and there will be plenty of dramatic conflict between the two of us before we reach the resolution and reconciliation over that final dinner at the end of Act Two.

A two-hander, then, for Actor and Author, with a mystery, a moralseveral morals, perhapsand a variety of stratagems, pratfalls, reversals of fortune, and painful soul-searchings along the way.

David Burke, now that I come to think about it, would be excellent casting to play David Burke. He has all the right qualities.

I dont know who could play my part.

Not me, though, in this particular story. Thank you. Not me.

ACT ONE

MF:

The story began for me at about nine oclock one morning the previous January, when Michael Blakemore phoned.

I was surprised at the call. Michael is not a great enthusiast for the bleak dawn hours, and over all the thirty years that we have been friends and all the six plays we have worked on together I dont believe he has ever called when the new day was quite so young. I also knew that he was going to be working that morning, rerehearsing the cast of Copenhagen in preparation for moving out of the Cottesloe auditorium at the National onto the somewhat smaller stage of the Duchess. But from the sound of his voice he plainly had urgent news.