The idea that we deviate from the path we are on - because of choice, chance or some sort of determinism - is one that British master dramatist and author Michael Frayn has long explored.
It threads through Frayn's 1998 play Copenhagen, which, following an international trend to revive many of his plays, gets an Auckland staging next week courtesy of recently arrived English director Alex Bonham and actors Jennifer Ward-Lealand, Bruce Phillips and Simon Kane.
Based on murky real-life events long argued over by historians and scientists, the award-winning drama revolves round a 1941 meeting between Werner Heisenberg (Kane), one of the scientists leading Nazi Germany's nuclear energy project, and his friend, mentor and fellow physicist Niels Bohr (Phillips), in occupied Denmark.
Exactly what Heisenberg's motivations were remain unclear, not helped by the fact that the protagonists, fearing they were being monitored by the Gestapo, talked to one another carefully and cryptically. Did he want Bohr to help him develop an atomic bomb so Germany could drop one on London, did he want moral guidance, or did he want the older man to know what might lie ahead so he could try to stop it?
In true post-modern style, Copenhagen explores what he might have been seeking by bringing together after their death the spirits of Heisenberg, Bohr and the latter's wife Margrethe, who acts as a sort of spectral witness, opening the play by asking, "Why did he come to Copenhagen?' and watching, commenting on from time to time, what the men are discussing and debating.
