Copenhagen in Stockholm

Abstract: The talk deals with various aspects of the Stockholm production of Copenhagen. In the preparatory stage, a major question consisted of identifying where the drama was in Frayn's seemingly theoretical text. Another part of the preparation involved contacts with physicists who helped in the understanding of what the characters talked about. In the course of the rehearsal period, the relationship between the three characters underwent interesting changes.

When we started preparing for the work on Michael Frayn's Copenhagen at Dramaten theatre in Stockholm, we naturally began by asking ourselves the question: how is it possible that this play has become so extremely popular? No sex, no violence, no family fights and nobody dragging around with his mom's ashes in an urn. Nor do we have to do with a show or a musical, and even if we were to discern how funny the play is, we didn't exactly find that it was a bedroom farce we had in front of us. Seemingly we had instead three middle-aged people who in the course of three long hours incessantly talk and talk - about theoretical physics.

In order to find the hidden play behind the surface, we searched the theatre's mythological roots and discovered a modern Oedipus drama: Pest has struck in Thebes - the bomb has fallen over Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the King, Heisenberg, is confronted with the question: Is this my fault? Have I angered the gods? He visits his "parents" Niels and Margrethe Bohr, and he does not give up until he has learned the truth.

In contrast to the first Oedipus, the very question of guilt remains unresolved for Heisenberg, but what he succeeds in achieving, however, is reconciliation and mutual forgiveness. Indeed, on the level of true friendship and intellect he has killed his father, Bohr. In this modern play it is not Margrethe he has had sex with, instead he has pronounced her his ambivalent mother figure and competitor for the one toward whom his desire is directed: the man, Niels. The question as to which one of these two men has blinded himself the most regarding the consequences of his scientific research is not answered in the play. To me it is evident that, in spite of their search for the truth of the universe, both of them have come to poke their eyes out.

King Oedipus has been called history's first detective story, and precisely as with the predecessor we have to do here with people who have given the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx - See the human being! and who in spite of this have since been forced to live with the inevitable shortcomings of the human being in that he/she is guilty of exaggerating either the male or female side of existence, either the mother's or the father's line. According to Claude Levi-Strauss, Oedipus has exaggerated the female and estranged himself from the male. In Heisenberg's case there seems to be the opposite relationship, he appears in the play as truly estranged from his wife, his daughters, indeed from everything not having to do with Beethoven or theoretical physics. Bohr stands outside this guilt and nor is he the one in the play who finds himself on the bench of the accused.

Already in the opening lines of the play we learn that the three characters are dead. We also understand that it is utterly important that they get an answer to the question Why. "Why did he - Heisenberg - come to Copenhagen?" It is Margrethe who puts the question to Niels, and when they have pondered it for a while, Heisenberg's uneasy spirit is invoked, and the three begin a mutual search for the answer.

Hence, my scenographer, Ulla Kassius, and I decided that the place of the play, the stage, was Saint Peter's anteroom, the place where the fate of the dead is decided: will I be doomed to heaven or hell? This is why it is so important for our three friends to reach consensus. If they do not agree and are not reconciled, they can never get into heaven. This is an important moral challenge to us all: without understanding the one who has become our enemy, we cannot be reconciled with him, and it is after all better to try to carry out that conversation before death than after. That is true for the relations among us common people, but it becomes even more evident in a global perspective.

Doubts have been expressed in the discussions as to whether it is morally defensible of Frayn to make use in this way of real, existing people, people who still live in the memory of friends and relatives, in order to construct a fiction. This is an interesting question, but in the case of Copenhagen I felt no such doubts, and I cannot free myself from the suspicion that they have to do with the fact that this time the story concerns members of our own, esteemed line. Had it been a story about Marilyn Monroe or Andy Warhol, perhaps nobody would have bothered. However, I am a theatre person and to me there are only good or bad plays. A bad play of this semi-documentary kind is judged by the so-called Jensen test. The Jensen test is an invention of a Danish dramaturge who told me that when he gets a play on his desk dealing for example with Strindberg, Sibelius and Tove Ditlevsen who meet in a bar, he changes the names to Jensen, Hansen and Moe. If after that the play is still exciting, it is a good play. If it loses its tickle at the disappearance of the famous names, it is a bad play, and it is the bad play that becomes parasitic because it hides its weakness behind the glamour of the famous names. Copenhagen passes the Jensen test. The dialogue swings and the dilemmas of the characters remain interesting even if the play had not been about Werner Heisenberg and the Bohr couple. Heisenberg's dilemma in Copenhagen: Was the pest in Thebes my fault? is a question for a king, that is, it is a question for whichever person at all, for Everyman.

Our stage was a small cube, a finite Black Stone, which, when it opened up, permitted the audience to see not only the actors, but also each other, mutual witnesses to the court proceedings that the play was. I had the privilege to cooperate with three of Sweden's most fantastic actors: Anita Björk, Jan-Olof Strandberg and Hans Klinga. We made the performance into a memory's battleground: Was it this way or that way it happened when Heisenberg came to Copenhagen in 1941? The play allows three such drafts. Twice the participants get stuck: - Sure, that may be the reason he came, but in that case we reach no reconciliation and we have to hit upon an explanation that permits that. If we do not reach a reconciliation, the bomb is detonated anew to the music of Beethoven's C minor. When in his memory Heisenberg returns to Bohr's home the third time, he finds husband and wife dancing with one another, also to the music of Beethoven. This dance invokes the characters' understanding of the ambiguity in our positions: - I see you, but I do not see myself - . It is this ambiguity of Heisenberg's (and Bohr's) true motivations that leads to the insight that both of them carried out mistaken actions then, in 1941. Heisenberg, unbelievably enough, by quite simply having made a wrong calculation for the size of the critical mass, and Bohr by rushing off quite irrationally instead of, as usual, getting his friend on the right track by asking a simple question. These mistaken actions brought about the circumstance that the bomb did not get into the hands of the Germans in time for them to win the war, but also brought about the making of the bomb - to be dropped over two cities much too far away from Copenhagen to constitute a risk for Europe's women, children and the man-on-the-street. These mistaken actions are the victory of the unconscious mind that did not want to make the bomb over the conscious that wanted to. The unconscious was in this play Heisenberg's better self, and as our real actions count for more than our evil intentions, he is freed from the accusations of history while at the same time the question is put whether it is not the other way around with Bohr, who was on the good side in the war but actually took part in the work in Los Alamos.

An enormous relief, almost a giggling atmosphere, is created when the three characters discover that they can release each other from the shared bond of guilt and anger. They become resourceful, they start telling each other little assertive anecdotes. Heisenberg ends with a long story about how at the end of the war he buys back his life from an SS soldier. In the course of the debate, Frayn has been criticized for letting a Nazi become the saviour in the time of need, and I do not understand that. The story about how a pack of Lucky Strike makes Evil Itself so confused that he forgets to kill, is a small pearl in the style of medieval legends about how - precisely the pest - comes to town in the course of the night and draws crosses on everybody's doors - all except one. Chance and Benevolence must also have a place in the world. Everything cannot be just, even in a detective story.