About the Play:

Copenhagen is one of Royal National Theatre of Britain's top 100 plays of the 20th century.

Copenhagen is a full-length drama by Michael Frayn. In Nazi occupied Copenhagen in 1941, a secret meeting took place between Nobel Prize winning physicist, Werner Heisenberg, a German, and his Danish mentor Niels Bohr, and the latter's wife, Margrethe. Both men have worked together to unlock secrets that could lead to the building of an atomic bomb and they debate the pros and cons of the bomb, with huge implications for both the Nazis and the Allies, and for our world today.

Copenhagen is a fictional account of an actual event during World War II. In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionized atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. But now the world had changed, and the two men found themselves on opposite sides in a world war. The meeting was fraught with danger and embarrassment, and ended in disaster. Why the German physicist Heisenberg went to Copenhagen in 1942 and what he wanted to say to the Danish physicist Bohr are questions which have exercised historians of nuclear physics ever since. In Michael Frayn's play Heisenberg meets Bohr under the watchful eye of Bohr's wife Margrethe once again to look for the answers, and to work out, just as they had once worked out the internal functioning of the atom, how we can ever know why we do what we do. For Heisenberg and Bohr, the question will always remain: what will come of the decisions we made?

Copenhagen premiered in 1998 at the Royal National Theatre in London and ran for more than 300 performances. It opened to rave reviews on Broadway in 2000 at the Royale Theatre and was awarded the Tony Award for Best Play, as well as the Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards and, in the United Kingdom, the Olivier and Evening Standard awards. Since then the play had regional premieres at professional theatres across the US and has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 1 female, 2 male

What people say:

"The most invigorating and ingenious play of ideas in many a year. An electrifying work of art." — The New York Times

"Superb. Dynamic." — The New Yorker

"Gripping. A brilliant play." — The Guardian (London)

"The word 'tremendous' is often used but seldom deserved. In this case it is. Copenhagen is an intellectual and theatrical tour de force." — The Times (London)

"Michael Frayn's tremendous new play is a piece of history, an intellectual thriller, a psychological investigation and a moral tribunal in full session." — The Sunday Times (London)

About the Playwright:

Michael Frayn is an English writer who enjoys equally successful careers as dramatist, novelist and translator, having started out as an award-winning journalist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy. His novel Headlong was shortlisted for the Mann Booker Prize. Born in London in 1933 and educated at Cambridge, he is married to the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin; they live in London.