Das Ende einer großen Freundschaft

Jülich. Die szenische Lesung «Kopenhagen» von Michael Frayn findet am Sonntag, 21. März, um 20 Uhr im Pädagogischen Zentrum des Gymnasiums Zitadelle der Stadt Jülich statt. Legendär

In dem Stück «Kopenhagen» geht es um die legendäre Begegnung der beiden Physiker Niels Bohr und Werner Heisenberg 1941 im von den Nazis besetzten Kopenhagen. Es war das Ende einer großen Freundschaft.

Nach ihrem Tod treffen sie sich auf der Bühne wieder und beschwören noch einmal die Geister der Vergangenheit. Was geschah 1941 wirklich zwischen beiden auf jenem ominösen Spaziergang in Kopenhagen?

Auf der Suche nach Antworten geraten sie an die Grenzen der Wahrheitsfindung. Kaum meinen sie, etwas erkannt zu haben, schon löst es sich wieder in Luft auf.

Der Engländer Michael Frayn wurde 1933 in London geboren. Nach einem Studium der Slawistik und Philosophie in Cambridge arbeitete er als Journalist beim «Guardian» und als Auslandskorrespondent beim «Observer».

Er berichtete unter anderem aus Israel, Japan und Schweden und wurde für seine Tätigkeit mit dem «National Press Award» ausgezeichnet. Seit 1968 arbeitet er als freier Schriftsteller und Übersetzer von Tschechow, Tolstoi und Anouilh.

Neben seiner berühmten Back-Stage-Komödie «Der nackte Wahnsinn» hat er unter anderem eine Neufassung von Tschechows «Platonow» unter dem Titel «Wilder Honig» sowie verschiedene Romane geschrieben.

Mit Begeisterung

Seit der Uraufführung in London 1998 wurde «Kopenhagen» unter anderem in New York, Paris und Berlin nachgespielt. Es wurde von Publikum, Kritikern und Wissenschaftlern gleichermaßen mit großem Interesse und Begeisterung aufgenommen und hat zu einer neuen, intensiven Auseinandersetzung der Forschung mit diesem Thema geführt.

Ausgezeichnet

Michael Frayn erhielt für «Kopenhagen» gleich mehrere Preise.

Die Einführung in das Stück übernimmt Professor Joachim Treusch aus Jülich.

Werner Heisenberg wird von Stefan von der Decken aus Wien dargestellt, Margarethe Bohr wird dargestellt von Maria Hartmann aus Berlin und Niels Bohr wird gespielt von Axel Scholtz aus München. Für die Inszenierung und Regie ist Isabella Gregor aus Wien verantwortlich.

Freie Eintrittskarten für die szenische Lesung im Pädagogischen Zentrum der Zitadelle der Stadt Jülich sind ab Samstag, 13. März, bei der Geschäftsstelle unserer Zeitung, Baierstraße 2a, erhältlich.

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Lecture on Frayn's Copenhagen (Malaspina University College, BC, Canada, 2001)

Introduction

Michael Frayn's new play Copenhagen has provoked considerable discussion since its first production in London in 1998. Much of that discussion focuses, naturally enough, on the historical record upon which so much of the play is based, and, as often as not, that historical record receives more attention than the play itself, or else the play becomes assessed in terms of that historical record.

POSTSCRIPT TO COPENHAGEN

by Michael Frayn [Prepared for the US production playscript edition.]

Where a work of fiction features historical characters and historical events it's reasonable to want to know how much of it is fiction and how much of it is history. So let me make it as clear as I can in regard to this play.

Michael Frayn Genres | Bibliography | Prizes and awards | Critical perspective

Biography Playwright, novelist and translator Michael Frayn was born in London on 8 September 1933. After two years National Service, during which he learned Russian, he read Philosophy at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He then worked as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian and The Observer, publishing several novels including The Tin Men (1965), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, The Russian Interpreter (1966), which won the Hawthornden Prize, and Towards the End of the Morning(1967). More recent novels include A Landing on the Sun (1991), which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year and Headlong (1999), the story of the discovery of a lost painting by Bruegel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. His latest novel, Spies (2002), a story of childhood set in England during the Second World War, won the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region, Best Book), and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year. Michael Frayn is also the recipient of the 2002 Heywood Hill Literary Prize.

His plays include Alphabetical Order (1975), Clouds (1976), Donkeys' Years (1977), Make or Break (1980), Noises Off (1982) and Benefactors (1984). Copenhagen (1998), about the 1941 meeting between German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish counterpart Niels Bohr, first staged at the Royal National Theatre in London, won the 1998 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year and the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play (USA).

He has also translated a number of works from Russian, including plays by Chekhov and Tolstoy. His films for television include First and Last (1989), for which he won an Emmy, and an adaptation of his 1991 novel A Landing on the Sun. He also wrote the screenplay for the film Clockwise (1986), a comedy starring John Cleese.

Copenhagen
Michael Frayn's absorbing drama about the meeting between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his mentor Niels Bohr (Philip Bosco during World War II was one of the most cerebral and entertaining plays of the 2000 Broadway season.
Dora, an opera in 2 acts
The scientific delvings into the human mind can also serve as a mother lode for dramatic invention. In this "science opera" the subject is Freud's analysis of one of his best-known and frustrating cases.
Einstein's Dreams
Holderness Theater Company used Kipp Erante Cheng's adaptation of A Alan Lightman novel of the same name. It supposes that Einstein's dreams informed his inspiration for his theories on time, and takes a surreal look into his creative impulses. In this story, time is measured in images, not hours or days--time is variously a line, a circle, a hangman's noose. A musical of this little book-- essentially an amalgam of parables -- is also in the works.
Einstein: A Stage Portrait
This one-person bio-drama covered a lot of territory, with flashbacks from Einstein's Princeton home to various phases of his personal and professional life.
The Einstein Project
The Einstein met here was an intense, charismatic but not very loving or lovable man. His relationship with his overly sensitive son are used to most tellingly illustrates the contradictions and flaws in his personality. He had an intense relationship with the boy, yet overchallenged him cruelly and ends up putting his public concerns before the boy's needs. A well staged production that deserves a wider audience.
An Experiment With An Air Pump
Shelagh Stephenson's drama takes its title as well as its inspiration from a 1767 painting by Joseph Wright whose work often depicted scientific or industrial subjects. In "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump" the painter captured a scene demonstrating that life could not exist in a vacuum. Three men and four women (the exact makeup of the cast) are watching the oldest man pump air out of a glass globe (the air pump) into which a live bird has been placed. A fascinating, multi-layered drama.
Fermat's Last Tango
Instead of supplying the proofs for his theorems, the seventeenth century mathematician, Pierre de Fermat, often challenged others to do so. When a Princeton professor named Andrew Wiles finally proved this puzzling theorem in 1990 he became that rarest of species, a mathematician who captured the public's imagination. -- until a colleague reviewing his work found an error, or what mathematicians call a hole. Many months later, while sitting in his office, still studying that fatal error, he suddenly saw it. It is Wiles' obsessive stick-to-itiveness that led the young musical team of Joanne Sydney Lessner (lyricist/librettist) and Joshua Rosenblum (composer/lyricist) to their own obsession -- the determination to translate Wiles' struggle into a musical.
The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem
A get together with a bunch of mathematicians at a British seaside resort in 1911, for a frolic about something called Number Theory. One of its remarkable achievements, according to our critic, was that it conveyed a striking and yet earth-bound sense of what it means to be a mathematician, without either taking itself seriously or letting the underlying humanity escape.
Flight
Orville and Wilbur Wright rank alongside Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison and other tinkerers and dreamers whose vision and perseverance profoundly changed the lives of people throughout the world. Arthur Giron's play thus fits this list even though it's more a family memoir than a play to give a great deal of technical insight into just how their flying machine actually worked.
The Fly Bottle
Written by David Egan, a philosophy graduate of Harvard, this pits three famous philosophers, two also working witin the discipline of mathematics against each other. A famous dispute between two of the three -- Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper -- prompts a Rashomon-like recapping from each man's point of view, as well as that of a third great 20th Century mind, Bertrand Russell.
Humble Boy
Essentially the story of a mother and son who live in the fictional Cotswold Village of Moreton in the Mold with an obvious parallel in Shakespeare's Hamlet. The scientific link is the son's occupation of bee keeping and discussions of theoretical physics and the gap between reality and our perception of it. Hypatia
Mac Wellman considers Hypatia, the 5th Century mathematician, pagan philosopher and inventor who was considered so inherently dangerous that Christian monks found it necessary to drag her through the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, before dismembering and then burning her body. The play follows Hypatia's imaginary trajectory from that spectacle through 8th Century Byzantium and then on to the early 20th Century.
Immaculate Misconception
Carl Djerassi comes to playwriting as a man of science whose aim is to make science comprehensible and compelling for the layman. In this debut play, the chemist who developed the birth control pill and shepherded it to worldwide success has taken a cutting edge area of biomedical science known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection or ICSI and dramatized it in very human terms. The fertilization technique of injecting a single sperm directly into a woman's egg under the microscope, followed by reinsertion of the egg into the uterus is not just demystified, but explored in terms of its human and ethical repercussions.
The Lone Runner: The Mythical Life Journey of Nikola Tesla
The story of Nikola Tesla has been dramatized twice in recent years-- this stunning version with puppets is my favorite, not only about Tesla but of all the plays about men of science recently seen.
Louis Slotin Sonata
On May 21, 1946 at the Pajarito Canyon Site, part of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, Louis Slotin was demonstrating to a colleague how to do a "crit" test for an atom bomb. A miscalculation led to Slotin's death from radiation nine days later. Paul Mullins' play focuses on his final days.
Monster
Science as in sci-fi has, seeded a whole mythology about Victor Frankenstein and his scientific studies and eventual obsession with defeating death by creating new life from the bodies of the dead. This Classic stage adaptation was adapted by Neal Bell.
Moving Bodies
Arthur Giron's play about Richard Feynman -- who was also the subject of Lincoln Center's several times extended QED (see below) -- produced as part Ensemble Studio Theatre's second annual First Light Festival (dedicated to the theater of science and technology).
Proof
David Auburn's wonderful play takes its name from a mathematical procedure, but it's accessible to a broad audience since you don't have to know what a prime number is to sympathize with its characters, three of whom are indeed mathematicians.
QED
Peter Parnell's biodrama about Richard Feynman was created especiallyfor Alan Alda whose charismatic presence made it a hit both in Los Angeles and New York.
Rain Dance
Lanford Wilson's play about four people contemplating the repercussions of the Los Alamos project in which two of the characters (engineers-- physicists, really) participated.
Star Messengers
Composer Ellen Meadow used the theories of celestial mechanics formulates at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th Century to create a stunning piece of musical theater that deserved to have a longer run than it did.
These were men for whom science was sufficiently expansive that it encompassed religion and art. Galileo, a Catholic, spent much of his life at odds with his church. (The picture above shows him in one such confrontation, with an outsized Pope Urban VII.) Kepler, a Lutheran, devoted much thought to reconciling his faith and his scientific discoveries. The importance of periodicity and harmony in the work of both Galileo (a musician's son) and Kepler made music elemental to their inquiries.
It is thus only superficially surprising that this subject matter makes fine fodder for a work of music-theater. Indeed, composer Ellen Meadow has focused quite precisely on the musical interpretation of Galileo (represented by Gina Leishman's accor The Talking Cure
Set in the early years of the twentieth century, Christopher Hampton's play deals with the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Though centered on Jung's relationships, the play looks at the issues which initially united these two pioneering psychiatrists and that which eventually divided them.
The Secret Order
Bob Clyman's contribution to EST's fourth First Light Festival goes behind the scenes of a prestigious research institution in New York. You may not come away much wiser about just what medical researchers do with their test rabbits and how they compute their findings, but neither does the techno talk and the occasional scribbling on charts make this a for science majors only play. Basically a fast-paced, entertaining psychological drama.
String Fever. The main offering of the fifth annual First Light Festival from Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Alfred P. Sloand Foundation Science & Technology Project. The six-actor ensemble comedy coils a woman's age forty issues around the elusive String Theory introduced to her by a new man in her life.
Tesla's Letters
A nother play about the underappreciated Nikola Tesla, whose contribution to science is with us every time we flick on a light switch. Even though the invention of electricity is associated in most people's minds with Thomas Edison, it was Tesla's discovery of the principle of the rotating field which is the basis of most alternating-current technology and which truly ushered in the age of electrical power.