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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.
No one knows exactly what was said when German physicist Werner Heisenberg visited his Danish-Jewish former mentor Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe at their home in occupied Copenhagen in 1941: only that the conciliatory, methodical, almost priestly Bohr became furious. It’s assumed they spoke about the development of nuclear fission as a source of energy and potentially a bomb for Nazi Germany or the US.
Was Heisenberg trying to further or hinder the quest for a weapon of mass destruction? Did he warn Bohr about the planned arrest and transportation of Denmark’s Jews? Frayn fuses this mystery to the revelation in early 20th century physics – I’m paraphrasing, I hope correctly – that any process is affected by the person observing it.
Similarly, the two men are often unaware of the precise motivation for their own actions. When they once visited the castle of Elsinore, their shared knowledge of Hamlet made them see every shadow as a representation of “the darkness inside the human soul”. One can never exactly predict an end result. The Nazis drove out Jewish scientists who built an A-bomb, initially to use against Germany.
The start, where the characters decide to go over the meeting in some sort of afterlife, has dated badly. Elsewhere, it’s very elegantly done, every factor feeding into the central thesis, from the death of two of the Bohrs’ six children to the act of pulling a cap gun or a packet of cigarettes from a pocket.
Heisenberg’s speed as a skier enabled him to skim over fissures much as he zipped (it is suggested) over basic principles of research. “Everyone understands uncertainty – or thinks he does,” says Bohr in one succinct phrase.
Professional ambition, nationalism or vengeful fury could be as much of a driver of scientific thought as pure curiosity. So could a certain macho bullheadedness. Kingston’s Margrethe is a partial riposte to, and a partial reinforcement of, the “great man” theory to which both men unconsciously subscribe. A brilliant mind herself, she’s used here as a representative of the ignorant audience, for whom things need to be kept simple. When her anger mounts, the men shrug: it’s a chain reaction.
In Kingston’s portrayal, Margrethe is arguably the most forceful figure on stage, a beady and exasperated presence. Molony has an easygoing charm that enables him to pull us into Heisenberg’s complicated thoughts and his burgeoning arrogance. Schiff, a hugely experienced American stage actor still best known here for The West Wing and The Good Doctor, seems least at ease with the script’s dense and lofty thoughts. But everyone stumbles, too often for it to go unnoticed.
Joanna Scotcher’s set places the actors, three chairs and a ghost light on a calibrated dial amid water surrounded by filament bulbs, suggestive of the Nordic landscape and the laboratories that inspired the men, but also ultimately elusive. Frayn, now 92 – and the writer whose curious mind I admire more than those of his near-contemporaries Stoppard or Bennett’s – was in the audience last night. After he wrote the play, new information emerged about the meeting of Heisenberg and Bohr, but no more clarity. Bittersweet proof all round that we can never know how things will turn out.
To 2 May, hampsteadtheatre.com.
