By Aline Mahrud

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN?: Wednesday 1 April, opens 2 April and runs through 2 May 2026 RUN TIME: 170 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

What happened when German physicist Werner Heisenberg visited his mentor Niels Bohr, whose father was Jewish, in the titular Copenhagen in 1941?

• Read on for reasons including how this is a brilliantly cast revival of a thought-provoking play which has plenty to say about world events we are currently living through

Danish academic Bohr, brought vividly to life by Richard Schiff from TV’s The West Wing, would go on to work in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where nuclear weapons were being designed.

Did Heisenberg, played as patriotic yet conflicted by Damien Malony (King Lear, Chichester Festival Theatre), ask his former professor whether the US was experimenting with nuclear fission in an attempt to create an atomic bomb to end World War Two?

Author Michael Frayn won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play in 1998 for this work and it drafts and redrafts different versions of events of the Copenhagen meeting with Boers’ wife Margrethe, played by an unsettled Alex Kingston (Admissions, Trafalgar Studios), who encourages both men to speak plainly rather than use scientific terms.

Director Michael Longhurst (Second Best, Riverside Studios, Hammersmith) gives us a stage with a revolve, scattered with occasional wooden chairs, to perhaps illustrate the cyclical nature of the very wordy exposition here.

Frayn uses easily understood terms regarding both men’s competitiveness and attitudes to skiing, table tennis and card playing to show how Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s attitudes to nuclear physics differ.

It’s fascinating stuff and astonishing to think how world events changed as a result of the actions of these 3 people whose conversations we’re watching.

Heisenberg’s on the back foot because the Nazis have expelled the Jewish scientists who lead this field and are now working with the UK and US against Germany.

If we had a criticism it would be that it’s a very talky play but that’s by necessity as there’s disagreement about what happened in Copenhagen.

Did Heisenberg perhaps withold from Germany the means by which it could produce and use nuclear arms at the most pivotal moment in its history?

Copenhagen also won 3 Tonys and this is a brilliantly cast revival of a thought-provoking play which feels like it has plenty to say about the world events we are currently living through.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Hampstead Theatre Tickets
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