Last Updated on May 6, 2026
4.0 out of 5.0 starsA lesson in quantum mechanics, ethics and human connection
With wars breaking out around the globe and the geopolitics unsteady, the reprisal of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen at Hampstead Theatre feels uncomfortably prescient. As bombings of nuclear facilities are shown on our news programmes, a play reflecting on the 1930s race to understand nuclear fission and onwards towards the development of the atom bomb makes for an important historical drama. Which countries have the ‘right’ to develop and use weapons of mass destruction remains as controversial today as it was in 1941 when Copenhagen is set.
Two scientists, German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr, have a secret meeting in Copenhagen in 1941. They are old friends and collaborators who began working on the mysteries of the atom in the 1920s. With World War Two raging, and Denmark under Nazi occupation, their 1941 meeting is shrouded in danger and mystery. The reason Heisenberg went to meet Bohr in Copenhagen, the content of their discussion, and the influence it had on the atomic race remain unknown and have kept historians arguing for decades. Frayn’s play has itself been the subject of debate and critique by some historians. He has written an essay in the programme about the details that emerged since his play was first staged and how this would have influenced the play had he had access to this information. Written and produced in 1998, the Hampstead production is the first time the play has been reprised in London.
Directed by Michael Longhurst (previously artistic director at the Donmar Warehouse), Copenhagen is a three-hander – Niels Bohr (Richard Schiff), Margrethe Bohr (Alex Kingston), and German physicist Werner Heisenberg (Damien Molony). It is a lengthy play running to almost three hours with an interval, and the content is complex.
Copenhagen’s three characters reflect on the 1941 meeting and explore the uncertainty surrounding the discussion. In doing so, they draw a parallel with earlier discussions of the atom’s uncertainty. The characters are ghosts of their former selves – or one might say exist in a parallel universe – and they circle constantly around the meeting that took place at the Bohr home in Copenhagen in 1941 when Heisenberg asked to see Bohr. The meeting was shorter than anticipated and ended abruptly when Bohr was angered by what Heisenberg said, although this being a play partly about memory, each one recalls the conversation differently. This important conversation took place on a walk outside the house to prevent the Nazi occupiers from overhearing what Heisenberg wanted to say. Since Heisenberg had official permission to visit Bohr, it is unclear whether he came to Copenhagen to find out whether the Americans, with whom Bohr is in touch, are working on developing a bomb.
In the first half of Copenhagen, the characters circle each other, trying to make sense of the meeting while also revelling in the memories of the intense collaboration – and competition – between the two scientists in the years they worked together in Copenhagen in the 1920s. Bohr was considered the Pope of the scientific community there, and Heisenberg was a very young and brilliant man who seemed to have been adopted (emotionally) by Niels and his wife, Margrethe. Although they have fallen out during the war years, there is clearly much warmth left between them. While by the second half of the play, the audience’s appetite for physics might be sated, this is where the play is most satisfying emotionally and psychologically. Frayn cleverly draws parallels between the science of the atom and the intricacies of human relationships, perhaps equally unknowable and uncertain. The painful decisions both men have faced – predominantly ethical decisions about whether physicists had the moral right to work on the atomic bomb – are elucidated and, finally, pent-up opinions about the behaviour of each man are expressed. As a Jew, Bohr was smuggled out of Denmark and across to Sweden on the night that the Nazi freighters arrived to deport all Danish Jews to the concentration camps and to their deaths. There is no suggestion that Heisenberg supported the Nazi policies; in fact, it is hinted at that his connections at the Danish Embassy in Copenhagen might have facilitated Bohr’s escape, but he loves Germany deeply and expresses his desire to save its people. Which country, which cities would survive and which would be obliterated during the war? That depended on who got to develop the atomic bomb first. The irony, of course, is that most of the German physicists who could have developed the bomb for Germany were Jewish and had either fled or been murdered. Bohr had to live with the guilt of having been part of the development of the bomb when he moved to work with the scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The character of Margrethe is central to the audience’s understanding of the discussion between the two scientists. The play is rather esoteric in parts, but Frayn allows his two scientists to explain the scientific language, sometimes graphically by moving chairs and people around to Margrethe and, in so doing, creates a conduit through which the ideas he writes about can be transmitted to the audience. If anything, there is a bit too much of this, but the play is more engaging when it deals directly with the emotional connection between the three characters. Copenhagen works well as a study of attachment and loss between parents and children, whether those are born to them or come into their lives as adults, as Heisenberg did. The Bohrs lost two of their children, and the play circles back time and again to the loss of the oldest son, Christian, who died in a drowning accident while sailing with his father.
Margrethe is the beating heart of the play and was beautifully performed by Alex Kingston. Her resonant voice elevated her level-headed, witty and, ultimately, emotionally astute insights. She was a foil for Niels Bohr, her emotionally buttoned-up, occasionally angry husband, who engaged with the world in a far more clinical way. Richard Schiff was not always audible; at times, he mumbled and stumbled on his words. No doubt this will settle down as the play beds in. Damien Malony gave a spirited performance as Heisenberg, a man who seems better known to the emotionally intelligent Margrethe than he is to himself.
The set (Joanna Scotcher) and lighting (Neil Austen) were excellent. A double revolve, round stage sat above a brooding, reflective black moat. The stage was surrounded by a circular LED light that changed colour – always orange when the characters circled repeatedly around the contents of the 1941 meeting. At this point, the stage would rotate too, which was particularly effective. Orange lighting hung like a forest, also changed colour at points. The audience was blinded by the lighting design when the bomb dropping was discussed, which was a shocking moment. The costumes used muted colours, and the men, dressed almost in a mirror image of one another, added a visual layer to the complexity of their father-son connection.
Copenhagen is about many ideas, from theoretical physics to ethics. Along the way, it draws the audience into a human story of nations pitted against each other, personal attachments and betrayals, love and loss. It is a complex play, perhaps too heavy-handed on the physics, but it leaves the audience with much to think about in a world where scientific advances continue to be used to destroy. I checked my phone on leaving the theatre to see if Trump was going ahead with his threatened obliteration of a civilisation and Iran’s infrastructure. Copenhagen felt frighteningly relevant.
Copenhagen runs at Hampstead Theatre from 27 March to 2 May 2026.
Hampstead Theatre Eton Ave, Swiss Cottage, NW3 3EU
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