Abstract: This talk will discuss the background and circumstances for Det Danske Teater (The Danish Theatre) setting up an entirely independent staging of Copenhagen in Denmark. In contrast to the version at the Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen, this production toured all over Denmark.

Finn Aaserud has asked me to tell you why and how the production of the play Copenhagen was made at "The Danish Theatre", which is a touring company playing around the city of Copenhagen and in bigger towns and cities in the province. The reason why we did it is obvious - everybody in this forum is probably acquainted with the exquisite qualities of Michael Frayn's play. Why we did it is due to circumstances which I don't know in detail, and Lily can correct me if I say something wrong. But this is what I have been told. From the beginning the production of Copenhagen was meant as a cooperation between "The Betty Nansen Theatre" and "The Danish Theatre", with the cast Lily Weiding, S›ren Pilmark and Henning Moritzen. But lack of inclination to move on tour (or maybe other simultaneous jobs in Copenhagen City) made the arrangement collapse, and Peter Aude, the head manager of "The Danish Theatre", was now in the situation that he could give up Copenhagen on tour or make his own production of the play. As he was frustrated, angry and passionately devoted to Frayn's play, he decided to do his own production of it. He offered me the part as Niels Bohr. I was negotiating with another theatre in Copenhagen at that time, but after having read Frayn's play and having been offered the part as Bohr, I decided to choose that, a decision I have never regretted. More than that, my wife Karen Nørregaard and I asked and were permitted to translate Copenhagen. There should be no fraternization at all. Karen is an eskimologist, but she has done a lot of translation work as well, on different subjects, and we have together translated several theatre texts before. So there is two translations of Copenhagen in Danish, and they were made at the same time, nobody looking over each other's shoulder.

The cast was: Elsebeth Steentoft as Margrethe, Nis Bank-Mikkelsen as Heisenberg, and I played Niels Bohr. We played Copenhagen 14 times in the province and 18 times around Copenhagen City.

Actually I don't know precisely what happened between the two theatres, and it doesn't matter. What I do care about, was that I was going to play one of the most fascinating and challenging texts in my career.

Karen was well equipped; she had recently translated Abraham Pais's second Einstein biography and was familiar with the terminology, and I have written several pieces of drama and should have some capacity in writing reliable lines. We cooperate well. Bram Pais, who had become a friend, offered his help, if there should be any trouble. Karen, with her academic mind, was the head of the first edition of our translation.

And then to the staging.

We had a good director, Brigitte Kolerus, who unfortunately died this year in June. She was half Austrian, half Danish, she was an intelligent and passionate person, she had a clear and musical mind, and was extremely well prepared. She and I were quite often sitting together to measure the depth of our understanding of the physics. Our lots were rather alike; we had both started as actors and had worked as such several years before we started as directors, - the difference was that she stopped (almost) as an actress and concentrated on directing, while I continued as an actor and changed between acting and directing. I love to be directed by directors, who also are, or have been, actors; we speak the same language, we are related to each other in both the physical and mental way, we can understand each other without the use of many words - our thoughts have to account for the body - and may be that is why actor-directors in general in my opinion more often respect the dramatic text, feel themselves more devoted to it, and use the text as the basis of their directions, feel obliged to it, while director-directors quite often (I don't say everybody) use the text as a tool to demonstrate their own originality, are inventive for the invention's own sake, construct "never-seen-before-angles" to the text, and thereby betray the playwrights will, the will of the text. My professor in theatre history on the Royal Theatre Academy, when I was a student there, Torben Krogh, called this will "the art-will" of the text, which you should always be loyal to. "Interpretation of a dramatic text may never shade the art-will of the playwright's text - to do it is idiotic and a sin". Ingmar Bergman, who I have worked with, said exactly the same. It has not prevented him from making original, innovative and brilliant productions, up to these days.

Our scenography was very simple: an empty stage with 3 chairs which we could move around, some boxes behind us with frosted glass, from where you could enlighten the stage in different sensitive pastel shades, a physical symbol on the center of the floor. The audience only in front of us, the conventional stage - we were going on tour and had to play at the theatres there - not exactly "The Royal Theatre in Sausage-by-the-Sea" or something like that (I am quoting from Frayn's farce Noises off - this was an inside joke, sorry), but conventional theatres. I didn't see the production at "Betty Nansen" - we were producing and playing at the same time, and it was two different universes - but I saw it in London in March this year, and it was about the same structure in the scenography, except for 1 or 2 rows of seats behind and above the stage. I have been told that at "Betty Nansen" they placed the stage in the middle of the floor and the audience all around. But again: 3 dead people on an empty stage in 3 hours, talking mostly about physics and physicists - what a daring and courageous project!

But I think that the factual information about physics in the play is what bewitched the audience most. The audience was deeply moved by the story, also fascinated by sitting face to face to the mystery these people were occupied with and themselves were - these people that had turned the world upside down and given us a new picture of the world, a picture most people had never understood (and maybe still do not understand), and now were sitting together with, in the same room. People love scientific facts - even if they don't understand. It's like hearing Einstein say "how come that everybody loves me and nobody understands me?"

The "style" of our version of Copenhagen grew naturally up in devotion to Frayn's text - we had no overarching concepts like doing the play in a Freudian, Jungian, Brecht-epic, tragic, absurd or whatever style, the style was implicit in the text and became visible during the rehearsals, and that was realism, now and then tinted with a tone of memory or dream, when our presence in the limbo was more significant.

Something was important to me in the role as Bohr: with Brigitte Kolerus's acceptance I decided to play Bohr as a from-time-to-time very passionate man. We found it necessary to do so also in order to create a well-balanced relation between the two men. Heisenberg provokes Bohr, and Bohr answers with a frightening power. It was too obvious, but wrong, very wrong, in my opinion, to play him as everybody in this country (and abroad, for that matter) knows him - that is the heavy, calm, cozy Uncle. There are good examples in the text to justify our choice, and we found other places and quotes, where Bohr, in our opinion, became temperamental. It was also necessary to do it to make a good balance between Bohr and Heisenberg. Here are some examples: Kramers, Dutch physicist, who worked with Bohr and Heisenberg 1916-26, said: "Bohr and Heisenberg were both tough, uncompromising and indefatigable". Aage Bohr, son of Niels Bohr, said: "Daddy was a bear". Bohr's ultrashort lecture on fission (Copenhagen, p. 29, Act I), we did very temperamental and engaged, Bohr's reaction to Heisenberg inviting Bohr to the German embassy the same. And I would like to give you 2 quotes from the play.

1. (subject: Schrödinger's wave mechanics vs. Heisenberg's matrix mechanics) (p. 9, Act II):

and

2. (subject: the paradox of the non-existing light tracks in the cloud chamber) (p.11, Act II (it is actually the same scene)):

"Heisenberg: You actually loved the paradoxes, that's your problem. You reveled in the contradictions.
Bohr: Yes, and you've never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That's your problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water.
H: I sometimes felt as if I was trapped in a kind of windowless hell. You don't realise how aggressive you are. Prowling up and down the room as if you are going to eat someone - and I can guess who it's going to be.
That's the way we did the physics, though."

What we did might not have been fully true to Bohr's nature and character, but it became the truth in our version of the play.

Finally I would like to quote a short sentence that I have written in my Copenhagen script during the rehearsals, concerning my costume. It shows that actors not only are moving around in a highly intellectual, spiritual atmosphere, far from the mob, but also deal with down-to-earth, practical matters. The sentence about my costume to my forgetful mind is written 10-15 places in the script: "don't forget to button up your upper button".