_Copenhagen_03488_credit-Marc-Brenner.jpeg?width=1200&auto=webp&crop=3%3A2)
Only in the UK would the phrase “too clever by half” be considered pejorative. It applies, though, to Michael Frayn’s play that wraps a meeting between two physicists in 1941, quantum theory and even Hamlet into a sometimes dazzling, sometimes boggling associative web about the ultimate unknowability of the universe and of human motivation.
The three-hander was a hit at the National Theatre in 1998 and then in the West End but in this revival director Michael Longhurst fails to carry the audience with him across much of the extensive intellectual terrain. Partly this is because the cast – Richard Schiff, Damien Molony and Alex Kingston – were to a greater or lesser degree stumbling over their words on opening night. And partly it’s because the stuff about the behaviour of particles and waves, uncertainty and complementarity, is pretty bloody complicated.
