Abstract: My staging of Copenhagen, the first full-length play I ever directed, was first shown non-publicly five times in November 2000 at the theatre of the Hochschule fuer Schauspielkunst "Ernst Busch". It was the result of a collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Subsequently it was performed internally at a number of physics conferences in Berlin und Hamburg. In my talk I will begin with a brief description of how this particular production of Copenhagen came to be. I will describe the planning phase of the staging as well as the cooperation with the Max Planck Institute and with a physics consultant. I will then discuss the criteria for my choice of actors and talk about some personal experiences in working with the play.

If one year ago someone had told me that one day I would be talking about the play at a symposium in Copenhagen, I would have called him crazy. In spring 2000 I was just on the way to choose my first-ever full-length play I was to direct. I had been studying stage directing in Berlin for three years. This was to be the next important step. When I had nearly come to a decision, I suddenly heard about a play called Copenhagen. The Max-Planck-Institut for the History of Science in Berlin proposed a cooperative project to our school. The play was to be shown at a symposium in November 2000. A play about physics, my teacher said. I read the play. Even though at school I thought there was nothing more boring than physics. But as soon as I read the play, I threw away all other plans. And I began to convince my teachers that I was the one who should direct the play. Unfortunately the whole project was to be non-public, because a famous organisation owned the rights to the 'first performance in Berlin'. On the other hand - for our invited audience - it seemed to be a special pleasure to take part in some top-secret event. Subsequently we had some guest performances at different physics conferences; one even took place in a university lecture hall.

But back to the beginning, the time of preparation. 'First', I thought, 'I have to understand the physics.' So I started to jump into some literature on physics. I read and read and the more I read the less I understood. Until finally I stumbled on a statement due to Einstein: The point is not to understand the world, but to find your way around it. Very true. I stepped back to study the play. On the same time I began to talk to people, in order to pose questions. Some conversations carried particular importance - those with Matthias Dörries, at this time working at the Max-Planck-Institut for the History of Science in Berlin and those with Caspar Steinecke, a young physicist working at the technical University of Berlin.

The physicist helped us to get an idea on what the characters in the play were talking about. These hours had been the first interesting physics lessons in my life. When weeks later the actors joined these meetings, the fire in his eyes when he talked about things like Uncertainty was igniting us. By listening to him, we learned about U-235 und U-238 and at the same time about the passion and the humour thoughts can carry. During rehearsals we worked a lot on finding a way to show the intensely humorous culture of intellectual disputes. In my opinion this creates the colour of eroticism in the play, which is, somehow, also a love story.

In my talks with Matthias Dörries during the time of preparation I remember one situation when he told me about different points of view on the event in Copenhagen in 1941. I remember asking him which was the most truthful. He did not give me an answer. Instead he proposed that I read several books. I did. Thomas Powers, Mark Walker, David Cassidy, Robert Junck. I was so fascinated by the fact that describing the same event, this one moment of history, the interpretations were extremly different. Not only different, but even contradictory. I began to stop looking for the most truthful answer, which brought me a big step closer to the play. In our rehearsals one special aim was to show how all characters were somehow right when presenting possible interpretations. Nevertheless the latter turn out to be contradictory. Different conflicting truths remain on equal footing. None is all-embracing by itself. The effect on the performance is that the characters are repeatedly heading for a new answer. And as soon they believe to have found it, it is evaporating into thin air. Especially Heisenberg is quite distraught in the last scenes due to all this emotional up and down, finding and losing and finding and losing again. An increasing rhythm until in the end Bohr's thought-experiment puts an end to the search. Well, the fact, that Matthias didn't give me an answer influenced our performance a lot.

But there were some days when we realized that despite all these thoughts, these disputes, these intense relationships, it just didn't work. Take for example the beginning of the play. We went back to the table, we read again, talked again, had different arguments about different thoughts, tried different arrangements. It did not work. Until finally we tried an experiment, to forget about everything and just to understand the words as music. And suddenly it worked. We started to work on the play, as though it was a symphony. So, an important part of our work became to examine the influence every special situation had on the rhythm, on the music of the play. The characters jumping between different historical moments were an important factor for our work on the rhythm. And more and more these switches - time-switches - became a playful challenge.

It is now just about one and a half years ago that I started working on Copenhagen. And I still feel like someone has given me a great present.