on Sundays in Lecture Room 2 of the Technological Institute, 2145 Sheridan Road, on the Evanston campus. Performances will be held March 30 through April 15 at 7:30 p.m. We wanted to celebrate ETOPiA’s 10th anniversary with something special, and this play is near and dear to our hearts.” Matthew Grayson This month three actors - including a Northwestern University engineering professor - will explore that mysterious conversation, which took place as Nazis and Allies raced to build the atomic bomb, when “Copenhagen” hits the stage at Northwestern and the University of Chicago. But why he visited or what the two physicists discussed has been a source of controversy ever since. Margrethe Bohr’s question rings at the heart of Michael Frayn’s 1998 Tony Award-winning play “Copenhagen.” No one disputes that German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg visited Bohr’s husband Niels on a September night in the middle of World War II.

Box office: 01243 781312.EVANSTON - “Why did he come to Copenhagen?” At Chichester Festival theatre until 22 September.Even if the science wasn’t as clear as it could be, it remains a remarkable play that has the rare capacity to make ideas manifest. However, while conveying Bohr’s paternal authority and impatience, Paul Jesson gave a rather blurred first-night performance and even rushed though vital speeches explaining Schrödinger’s wave function and uranium 235. Patricia Hodge captures perfectly the wary scepticism of Margrethe, who sees the personal motives underlying scientific abstractions. Michael Blakemore’s illuminating production – designed, as in 1998, by Peter J Davison and lit by Mark Henderson – treats the stage as a space for the collision of human particles.Ĭharles Edwards is outstanding as Heisenberg in that he combines a Hamlet-like uncertainty about his own course of action with the physicist’s faith in intellectual disciplines: at one point he cries “mathematics is sense” with the fervour of an ardent rationalist. While those ideas are still there, I was more struck this time by the Brechtian paradox at the heart of the play: that the vilified Heisenberg, by his failure to make the crucial calculation that would have enabled the Germans to develop the atomic bomb, never caused a single death while the virtuous Bohr, by going on to work at Los Alamos, contributed to a hundred thousand.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn