COPENHAGEN By Michael Frayn
WELCOME
and Democracy among others. He has also directed Copenhagen in the West End, Broadway, Australia and Paris. We’re thrilled to welcome three celebrated actors to play the protagonists in this important play. Charles Edwards returns to play Werner Heisenberg and Paul Jesson makes his Chichester debut as Niels Bohr. Following her acclaimed appearance in Travels with My Aunt (Festival 2016), Patricia Hodge returns to play Margrethe Bohr.
DANIEL EVANS AND RACHEL TACKLEY PHOTOGRAPH BY TOBIAS KEY
Welcome to this new production of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Michael is one of our most distinguished playwrights, and it’s hard to believe that this will be his first original play to be staged at Chichester (his version of Uncle Vanya was produced in the Minerva in 2012). It is therefore a double cause for celebration that, 20 years after Copenhagen’s premiere at the National Theatre, its original director Michael Blakemore is revisiting this remarkable and multi award-winning play. Though the play depicts events from over 75 years ago, its themes remain as significant and resonant today.
We are pleased to be supporting this run with both Pre and Post-Show Talks, and a special event with Kate Mosse in conversation with Michael Frayn. Do visit our website for more details. We hope you enjoy today’s performance.
Artistic Director Daniel Evans
Michael Blakemore is also making a very welcome debut in Chichester. He has a long-standing association with Michael Frayn’s plays, having staged the original productions of Noises Off, Benefactors
cft.org.uk
Executive Director Rachel Tackley
TH E CAFÉ & THE FOYLE TERRACE The Café in the Festival Theatre is open daily from 10am serving freshly made sandwiches, soup, cakes and pastries. Enjoy our barista coffee or choose from a range of hot and cold drinks including wines and beers. The Café is light and airy and offers al fresco seating and free Wi-Fi. The Bar and The Foyle Terrace in the Festival Theatre are open 90 minutes before the show and both serve a selection of locally produced spirits, beers, lagers and wine by the glass or the bottle. The Foyle Terrace also serves pizzas, quiches, jacket potatoes and salads before the show.
The Brasserie in the Minerva Theatre is open for pre-show dining in new stylish and elegant surroundings. The restaurant serves a contemporary British menu using local and seasonal ingredients as well as an excellent choice of wines. Open 12.30pm - 2.30pm on matinee days and from 5.30pm for evening performances.
Enjoy either a main meal or one of our lighter food options before or after the show in the Minerva Bar & Grill upstairs, which offers a more relaxed atmosphere. Open 90 minutes before matinee performances, from 5pm for evening performances, during the interval and post-show.
RESERVATIONS
To reserve a table in the Brasserie or Minerva Bar & Grill visit cft.org.uk/dining for online reservations. Alternatively please call 01243 782219 or email dining@cft.org.uk
COPENHAGEN By Michael Frayn
COPENHAGEN REVISITED One of the implications of quantum mechanics, at any rate as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg first formulated it in the 1920s, is that the act of observation changes what’s being observed. My efforts in this play to examine Heisenberg’s famous visit to Niels Bohr in 1941 seem to have had a somewhat similar effect. Exactly what happened, and what Heisenberg’s intentions were, have been endlessly disputed. The attempts of my two characters, together with Bohr’s wife Margrethe, to reconstruct and understand the event from beyond the grave are of course fictitious, but I based everything that I possibly could – about the characters, the physics, and the meeting itself – on the historical record. I’m not the first person, though, to discover that history can shift disconcertingly beneath your feet – and in this case the shift was precipitated by the fiction that I had built upon it. It happened because the play occasioned complaints, when it was first produced in London in 1998, but more particularly when it was done in New York two years later, that I had been too ready to allow Heisenberg to make a case for himself. At a symposium on the play in the City University of New York, Gerald Holton, a distinguished American historian of science, was moved to reveal the existence of an unpublished letter by Bohr, which, he said, would entirely change everyone’s view of the meeting. Bohr had never offered any direct account of it, but in 1957, said Holton, when Heisenberg first offered his own version, Bohr was so angry that he had written to Heisenberg to protest. He had never sent the letter, though, and when it was found among his papers after his death in 1962 it was apparently thought to be so contentious that, on Holton’s advice, it had been hidden away in the Bohr Archive, not to be MICHAEL FRAYN IMAGE BY CONRAD BLAKEMORE
released for another fifty years. (An odd reaction from a historian to exciting new material.) This would not have been until 2012, but the tantalising glimpse that Holton had offered aroused so much interest and speculation that the Bohr family decided to release it early. When it appeared, in 2002, Bohr’s indignation caught the fancy of the world’s press, and the letter was seen as an indictment of Heisenberg’s equivocal attitude to both the truth and the Nazi regime.
‘The conversation swiftly turned to the human questions and misfortunes of our time’ The sharpness of Bohr’s tone is certainly a surprise - particularly coming from a man so celebrated for his conciliatoriness. He is greatly amazed, he says, to see how much Heisenberg’s memory has deceived him. He claims to remember every word of the conversations he had with Heisenberg and Weizsäcker, in particular their ‘definite conviction that Germany would win and that it was therefore quite foolish for us to maintain the hope of a different outcome of the war and to be reticent as regards all German offers of cooperation.’ He plainly had second thoughts about what he had written, though, because there was not one but many drafts of the letter in the archive. His endless redrafting of his scientific papers was celebrated, and he had evidently done much the same here in his struggle to reconcile his uncharacteristic anger with his characteristic courtesy. In the end he gave up,