SS25 | COPENHAGEN

By Michael Frayn
Directed by Marlon Hoffmann

Why did he visit? What did they discuss? And where, exactly, did they even walk? The 1941 visit of German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg to Nazi-occupied Denmark to meet his former mentor and colleague Niels Bohr, then potentially connected to the Allied nuclear program, has sparked endless debate. Was the intention personal, patriotic, or both? Did politics get in the way of physics or physics in the way of politics?

Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen stages an imagined afterlife encounter between Niels Bohr, his wife Margrethe, and Werner Heisenberg. The play unravels the personal and political tensions between the two physicists, who found themselves on different sides in WW2. Heisenberg, working for the German atomic program, confronts Bohr over the moral implications of nuclear research. As they circle their 1941 encounter from multiple angles, the play explores themes of memory, uncertainty, and the weight of scientific discovery.

Weaving quantum mechanics into human conflict, Frayn uses Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as a metaphor for the shifting nature of truth and intention. The characters are trapped in an endless loop of reflection and regret, grappling with the limits of memory and truth, their recollections refracting like particles under observation. The play itself becomes a thought experiment in which the scientists are both the observers and the observed. As they confront questions of responsibility, betrayal, and the civil and military uses of scientific discovery, their attempts to reconstruct the past appear to mirror the way measurement alters quantum states.

A Coproduction with the Verein der Förderer und Freunde der Universität Hamburg e.V. COPENHAGEN was presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals GmbH on behalf of Samuel French Ltd.