The Copenhagen papers

Description:

"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 physicist Werner Heisenberg made to his former colleague Niels Bohr in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. The two old friends, both nuclear scientists, found themselves on opposite sides in a world war, and 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 was presented with a curious package from a London housewife that contained a few faded pages of barely legible German. These pages, apparently found concealed beneath some floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of play. The emergence of more material - specifically notes that appeared to give instructions on how to put up a Ping-Pong table but perhaps contained important encoded information - was followed with particularly close interest by the actor David Burke, who played Niels Bohr in the London production and had some experience with documents of this sort. Frayn, for his part, began to lose all sense of certainty, obsessed as he was with cracking the riddle of the papers. Finally, when the fog cleared, Frayn and Burke sat down together, much as Bohr and Heisenberg do in the play, to ponder the winding trail of the Copenhagen papers."--BOOK JACKET.

subjects: Nuclear weapons,  Biography,  Scientists,  Forgery of manuscripts,  Atomic bomb,  Germans,  History,  Germans, great britain,  Scientists, biography

People: Michael Frayn,  Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976),  David Burke (1934-)

Places: England,  Germany,  Godmanchester,  Godmanchester (England)

Times: 20th century