There’s no faulting Irish actor Damien Molony as Heisenberg – the more youthful figure besides Schiff’s quiet, beadily scholastic Bohr as their intellectual friendship is relived, alongside the fraught exchanges of 1941. Molony manages to communicate an extrovert charm that somehow augments the enigma – what’s going on in his head puzzles the others, and himself too. The evening builds to collide the miracle of the world’s narrow escape from Nazi nuclear domination with the elusive nature of existence itself, and the fragility of all our afterlives (which perforce takes in the Trumpian world order).
Longhurst answers the brain-boxy material with visual dazzle, avoiding static lecture-mode with a double-revolve that shifts the trio’s positions, combining meditative restlessness with a suggestion of atomic particles. Joanna Scotcher’s design also cannily uses rows of lightbulbs, reflective surfaces and rippling water to conjure a cross between Copenhagen, a nuclear reactor and a Stygian no-man’s land. A commendable enough tribute to Frayn’s classic, all told, despite the fluffs.
Hampstead Theatre (hampsteadtheatre.com), until May 2