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    The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue
    The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue
    The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue

    By Michael Frayn and David Burke

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    About this ebook

    In a brilliant coda to the play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn receives mysterious letters that take him back to the theme of his bestselling novel, Headlong -- human folly, this time his own.

    Michael Frayn's Copenhagen has established itself as one of the finest pieces of drama to grace the stage in recent years. The subject of the Tony-winning play is the strange visit the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg made to his former mentor, scientist Niels Bohr, in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and the quarrel that ensued. Heisenberg's intentions on that visit, for good or for evil, have long intrigued and baffled historians and scientists. One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, Frayn received a curious package from a suburban housewife, which contained a few faded pages of barely legible German writings. These pages, which she claimed to have found concealed beneath her floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of play. As more material emerged -- specifically notes that appeared to give instructions on how to put up a table-tennis table but perhaps containing important encoded information -- actor David Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, began to display extreme, even suspicious interest in Frayn's growing obsession with cracking the riddle of the papers. And Frayn, for his part, lost all sense of certainty. Was he the victim of an elaborate hoax? By turns comic and profound, The Copenhagen Papers explores the conundrum that is always at the heart of Frayn's work -- human gullibility and the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 4, 2003
    ISBN9781466829435
    The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue
    Author

    Michael Frayn

    Michael Frayn is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling Headlong, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection and a Booker Prize finalist, and Spies, which received the Whitbread Novel Award. He has also written a memoir, My Father's Fortune, and fifteen plays, among them Noises Off and Copenhagen, which won three Tony Awards. He lives just south of London.

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    • 5/5
      What a romp! Having been in the play some time ago, I really enjoyed this book. It was playful and intelligent. I highly recommend it.

    Book preview

    The Copenhagen Papers - Michael Frayn

    PROLOGUE

    Michael Frayn

    It was a long war for the original London cast of my play Copenhagen. The three of them—David Burke, Sara Kestelman, and Matthew Marsh—played it from May 1998 until August 1999, first in repertory at the National Theatre for nine months, then straight into the West End to do seven performances a week at the Duchess for another six months. It’s a play that makes great demands upon its small cast. All three of them are onstage virtually throughout the evening, discovering quantum mechanics and developing nuclear fission, then exploring some of the philosophical darknesses of the human mind.

    On the August night that they finally came to the end of their grueling tour of duty, we all went out to dinner afterward to celebrate. They had certainly earned a celebration, but they must have been almost too tired to enjoy it, like exhausted troops returning from the front, and they must have felt that the rest of us there—Michael Codron, who produced the play in the West End, and who was giving us the dinner; Michael Blakemore, who directed the production; and I—could never share what they had been through. We had been left behind, the staff officers who had sent the troops into battle, then spent the war in safety and idleness many miles behind the front line.

    In spite of all this, David Burke and I, at any rate, spent the evening in the most animated conversation. But then he and I had a great deal to talk about, and a second cause for celebration. For us the evening marked the end not just of his stint at the front but of another long trail—and a rather more bewildering one for both of us.

    Like me, David is in his mid-sixties, and though we’d never worked together before I had admired him for a long time, from when I first saw him in the original production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular in 1973, to his most recent appearance as Kent in Richard Eyre’s fine production of Lear at the National—a great arc of career spanning nearly thirty years and the whole range of English theatre, from the funniest of comedies to the most harrowing of tragedies. His performance as the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in my play had been quite remarkable, and his incarnation of Bohr’s celebrated combination of percipience and innocence, of toughness and lovability, had moved me deeply. It was not his acting that we were talking about, however, nor, for that matter, the riches of wisdom and experience that we must both have accumulated in the course of our long lives. We were talking about the contents of the large brown envelope on the floor between our two chairs. We were discussing the mysterious batch of papers whose gradual emergence over the previous months had preoccupied us both almost as intensely as the play had.

    The subject of Copenhagen, I should explain, is itself a mystery—the strange visit that the German physicist Werner Heisenberg paid to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. They were old friends and colleagues, but Denmark was now under German occupation, and Heisenberg had become an enemy. Though he couldn’t say it openly to Bohr, he had also become the head of the Nazi government’s nuclear program. The two men had a private conversation that ended abruptly and angrily, and their great friendship along with it, but no one has ever been able to reconstruct what they said to each other, or to agree on what Heisenberg’s intentions were in making his unwelcome but evidently pressing visit.

    The papers in the large brown envelope at our feet related to a later chapter in the story, when Heisenberg, together with all the other German physicists who had been involved in atomic research, was rounded up by the British at the end of the war and secretly interned for six months in Farm Hall, a country house on the outskirts of Godmanchester, in Huntingdonshire. It was another bizarre episode. As Heisenberg had now told Bohr 299 times in the play:

    Our families in Germany are starving, and there are we sitting down each evening to an excellent formal dinner with our charming host, the British officer in charge of us. It’s like a pre-war house-party—one of those house-parties in a play, that’s cut off from any contact with the outside world, where you know the guests have all been invited for some secret sinister purpose. No one knows we’re there—no one in England, no one in Germany, not even our families. But the war’s over. What’s happening? Perhaps, as in a play, we’re going to be quietly murdered, one by one. In the meanwhile it’s all delightfully civilised. I entertain the party with Beethoven piano sonatas. Major Rittner, our hospitable gaoler, reads Dickens to us, to improve our English.…

    Did these things really happen to me? wonders Heisenberg in astonishment as he recalls them. They certainly did, because the events at Farm Hall, unlike those in Copenhagen, are most thoroughly documented. The house had been comprehensively bugged by British Intelligence, who made recordings of the German scientists’ unguarded conversations among themselves in order to find out, presumably, how much they had discovered about building an atomic bomb. The transcripts of these recordings were kept secret by the British government until 1992, when they were at last pried loose by a combined task force of historians and scientists, and finally published.

    The papers in the envelope, however, were something else again—a completely new source of information about Farm Hall—and they cast an astonishing new light on the story. Now that David was free from the distracting pressures of those seven mighty performances a week, I suggested to him that we should collaborate to write a brief account of the documents, and of the way in which they had come to light, taking turns to explain how each of us had been involved at each separate stage. He agreed.

    So here it is, laid out rather like the dialogue in a play. MF speaks first; DB speaks second; and we shall both have a lot more to say to each other before we are through. It’s a bit like a play in other ways as well: the story falls neatly into two acts, each neatly rounded off by a celebratory dinner, and there will be plenty of dramatic conflict between the two of us before we reach the resolution and reconciliation over that final dinner at the end of Act Two.

    A two-hander, then, for Actor and Author, with a mystery, a moral—several morals, perhaps—and a variety of stratagems, pratfalls, reversals of fortune, and painful soul-searchings along the way.

    David Burke, now that I come to think about it, would be excellent casting to play David Burke. He has all the right qualities.

    I don’t know who could play my part.

    Not me, though, in this particular story. Thank you. Not me.

    ACT ONE

    MF:

    The story began for me at about nine o’clock one morning the previous January, when Michael Blakemore phoned.

    I was surprised at the call. Michael is not a great enthusiast for the bleak dawn hours, and over all the thirty years that we have been friends and all the six plays we have worked on together I don’t believe he has ever called when the new day was quite so young. I also knew that he was going to be working that morning, rerehearsing the cast of Copenhagen in preparation for moving out of the Cottesloe auditorium at the National onto the somewhat smaller stage of the Duchess. But from the sound of his voice he plainly had urgent news.

    A very curious letter had arrived in the morning post, he explained, and he had to read it over to me at once. It came from an address in Chiswick, and was signed Celia Rhys-Evans. Some weeks ago, Michael read out to me, "as an anniversary treat, my husband and I came to see Copenhagen under the mistaken assumption that it was a play about the capital of Denmark, where we had spent a very happy honeymoon many years ago. Also, we had loved Michael Frayn’s wonderful farce Noises Off. You can imagine that, in the event, our visit to the National Theatre proved a disconcerting

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