About the work
Copenhagen is a play by the British writer Michael Frayn. It premiered in 1998 at the Royal National Theatre in London, directed by Michael Blakemore, with David Burke, Sara Kestelman and Matthew Marsh in the lead roles. The play is built around a historical puzzle: the visit German physicist Werner Heisenberg paid to his Danish mentor Niels Bohr in occupied Copenhagen in 1941.
Plot
After their deaths, Bohr, his wife Margrethe and Heisenberg meet again as memory figures and try to reconstruct what they actually discussed. They replay the encounter several times, each version giving Heisenberg a different motive: to signal restraint to the Allies, to learn how far Allied nuclear research had progressed, or to ease his conscience. No version settles into certainty, echoing the uncertainty at the heart of the physics the two men once shared.
Cultural significance
Copenhagen won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play and has since been translated into more than a dozen languages. Bohr's own letters to Heisenberg, released by his family in 2002, showed how differently the two physicists still remembered their meeting decades later – underscoring the very uncertainty about memory and motive the play dramatises.