Michael Frayn's 'Copenhagen'

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Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds – J. Robert Oppenheimer

In 1941 the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg made a trip to Nazi occupied Copenhagen to meet with his Danish pre-war colleague, confidante, father figure and friend, the great Niels Bohr. In the 1920s the men’s work in quantum mechanics had revolutionised atomic physics, and changed the philosophical fundamentals of how we experience our world. By 1941 the world had been changed again, and the two men found themselves on opposite sides in a war that would tear Europe apart; a war which would culminate in the dropping of two atomic bombs.

In perhaps his greatest work, considered by many to be a modern masterpiece, Frayn attempts several drafts of what might have passed between the two great minds. The result is a play about friendship, about fear, about humanity’s greatness, and humanity’s frailty.