Copenhagen

In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr

They were old friends and close colleagues

In the 1920s they had revolutionised atomic physics with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle

But now the world had changed, and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war

The meeting was fraught with danger and embarrassment, and ended in disaster

Why the German physicist Heisenberg went to Copenhagen in 1942 and what he wanted to say to the Danish physicist Bohr are questions which have exercised historians of nuclear physics ever since

In Michael Frayn's play, Heisenberg meets Bohr and his wife Margrethe once again to look for the answers

And to work out - just as they had once worked out the internal functioning of the atom - how we can ever know why we do what we do

REVIEWS

"A masterwork" ~ Jeremy Kingston, The Times

"A profound and haunting meditation on the mysteries of human motivation" ~ Paul Taylor, Independent