Maryam Philpott in North London
★★★☆☆
8 April 2026
Do humans have the right to destroy each other, and should only the good guys have access to decisive weapons? Michael Frayn’s revered 1998 science play Copenhagen, revived at Hampstead Theatre, has plenty to say about nuclear fission and the chain reaction of atomic detonation, but at heart it is a memory play as two titans of early twentieth-century physics try to remember what brought them together in September 1941. Director Michael Longhurst has a tendency to overproduce rather than allowing the text and the actors to do the work, but his emphasis on friendship, betrayal, and the humanity of his subjects eventually develops critical mass.
Richard Schiff as Niels Bohr.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
No one knows why Werner Heisenberg, a German nuclear scientist, visited his friend and mentor Niels Bohr at his Danish home in 1941 or what transpired between them. As the pair, along with Bohr’s wife Margrethe, make their case to the audience and each other, the story of conflict physics, of the German occupation of Europe, and the many roads to destruction open out before them as they grapple with their own history and legacy.
Copenhagen is a very wordy play that not only tries to spell out complex physics processes and reactions but actively shifts the narrative around, handing duties back and forth between the three leads who each reflect back from their unspecified future standpoint and break into the action with personal commentary. At the same time, Frayn adds complexity for the performers and the audience with a time-leap story the cuts between 1941 and the years before and after Heisenberg and Bohr’s fateful meeting, to explore consequences along with the path that shaped this crucially competitive friendship. Here, the actors do pretty well to keep control of the winding story but don’t always manage the crisp clarity that would allow the audience to keep track of places, physics metaphors, and, at a basic level, cause and effect.
In the longer first part, Longhurst tends to overuse his staging tools – a rounded stage with double rotation, lighting effects similar to his work on Nick Payne’s Constellations that replicate the beauty of chemical reactions, and a cinematic soundscape that emphasizes the tension. The revolve in particular becomes too prominent, distractingly so at times as a device to pick out the pacier bits of text and turning-point moments which can smother Frayn’s own rhythm. Yet, the director leaves the actors more to their work in the second part and the tension is all the better for it as the dynamic starts to catch fire.
It is a long dense work filled with exposition about trust and surveillance – a theme not given any reference in the staging – that deliberately leads scientists and audience members on long digressions that do occasionally feel heavy, especially as it draws towards its conclusion. Damien Molony has the most to work with as Heisenberg, a brilliant, narcissistic, German patriot who may not be quite as clever or as cunning as he thinks he is. Alex Kingston makes great work of Margrethe, protectively devoted to her husband but increasingly frustrated by the circularity of the arguments put forward, while Richard Schiff’s Bohr is harder to know but becomes morally ambiguous as his role in the successful deployment of the atomic bomb unfolds.
As Heisenberg and Bohr work together and apart, Frayn’s play continues to probe at the essential humanity and morality of scientists working on destructive technologies, and at the end of Copenhagen the world they knew and created is only full of uncertainty.