'Copenhagen' and 'King Lear'

Here’s a brief appreciation of a performance of Michael Frayn’s play ‘Copenhagen’, which I saw last night at Oxford’s sparkling new Mathematics Institute. Alas, I missed the 111 theatre Company’s earlier plays on scientific themes, ‘Emilie – La Marquise du Chatelet defends her life tonight’ and ‘Trumpery’, a drama about Charles Darwin and his rival Wallace.

 

I used to go to see any play Michael Frayn wrote, and still read any book he published – but as a non-Londoner with a  fairly frantic life I’d missed ‘Copenhagen’ on its first outing and, though much taken with the subject, had never previously seen it.

 

I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it.  It’s about an actual, but mysterious meeting between two of the greatest scientific minds of all time. Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, mediated by the often acid commentaries of Bohr’s highly perceptive wife Margrethe (one of the best female parts I’ve seen lately in film or theatre). Both men had become friends during the near-legendary period of international scientific excitement in the 1920s, when for a short while scientists believed they might actually be going to explain everything, and young men ran to the laboratory early in the morning, so enthralled were they by their work.

 

Heisenberg, by the way, is played by Alexander Rain, who manages to look extraordinarily like the German genius, Bohr is played by Michael Taylor and Margrethe Bohr by Katherine Jones. All three create an extraordinary tension on the austere stage, and for much of the time quite a lot of the audience seemed to be holding their breath as three clever people wittily and pungently debated some of the most tremendous subjects man can address, while an old friendship collapsed into ashes and ruins. Bohr was a very good man who lived well and courageously. By contrast, there’s a lot you can say against Heisenberg, if you like to think of yourself as being faultless and wholly courageous. But there’s quite a lot to be said for him as well. And, to irritate the silly atheists who think that science negates religion,  Heisenberg made a couple of remarks that seem to me to be  relevant to this debate. Remember, this comes from a  man who had looked deep inside the architecture of the universe, equipped with powers of understanding most of us cannot help to possess:

 

‘In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.’

 

And: ‘The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.’

 

 

If I have understood the rather tough second half of the play  rightly, it confirms a view I have long held, that the human mind holds back from discoveries it does not wish to make, or fears to make. This is usually because they will lose us friends or destroy happy certainties with doubt. This is why we do not change our minds very often. In this case, the fear was even deeper or greater. It’s a very satisfying explanation of why Germany never got very far in developing an atom bomb, despite Heisenberg’s brilliance. I would like to think it was true.

 

This was the second play I managed to see during the Oxford summer, the first being a performance (by the Globe company) of ‘King Lear’, in the unrivalled setting of the Bodleian Library courtyard, a building exactly contemporary with Shakespeare. The Globe have mastered a technique of concentrating Shakespeare, with very few frills or costumes and on a stage nearly as austere as the Mathematical institute.  It’s all pretty informal – Shanaya Rafaat, who plays an unusually seductive (and so particularly wicked)  Regan came and chatted to the audience before the play began.

 

Perhaps it’s because these productions are so spare that the force of the words comes through very hard. Lear is crammed with passages that haunt the mind (How sharper than a serpent’s tooth…’ ‘As flies to wanton boys…’  but is above all about the amazing capacity of men to believe their enemies are their friends, and to be beguiled by oily flattery and displeased by truthful love  (how else could the Tory party have survived so long).

 

Then there is its limitlessly sad closing line (so powerful for each generation as we discover too late that our fathers and mothers were seeking so hard to communicate their experience to us, and we were too busy and arrogant to pay attention): ‘We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long’.