The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Michael Frayn's Copenhagen has established itself as one of the finest pieces of drama to grace the stage in recent years. The subject of the Tony-winning play is the strange visit the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made to his former colleague Niels Bohr in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. The two old friends, both nuclear scientists, found themselves on opposite sides in a world war, and Heisenberg's intentions on that visit, for good or for evil, have long intrigued and baffled historians and scientists." "One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, Frayn was presented with a curious package from a London housewife that contained a few faded pages of barely legible German. These pages, apparently found concealed beneath some floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of play. The emergence of more material - specifically notes that appeared to give instructions on how to put up a Ping-Pong table but perhaps contained important encoded information - was followed with particularly close interest by the actor David Burke, who played Niels Bohr in the London production and had some experience with documents of this sort. Frayn, for his part, began to lose all sense of certainty, obsessed as he was with cracking the riddle of the papers. Finally, when the fog cleared, Frayn and Burke sat down together, much as Bohr and Heisenberg do in the play, to ponder the winding trail of the Copenhagen papers."--BOOK JACKET.

FROM THE CRITICS

Richard Bernstein - New York Times

. . . a deliciously intricate, whimsically philosophical little intrigue that, in Frayn's view especially, mockingly duplicates some of the themes of the play Copenhagen.

Publishers Weekly

While Frayn's play Copenhagen won three Tony awards in 2000 (including best play), and the London playwright has Noises Off and the Booker Prize finalist Headlong to his credit, he doesn't enjoy the same name recognition here as does, say, a native like David Mamet. Interest in this Copenhagen spinoff project may thus depend on readers' willingness to delve into the arcana of physics and history, and into the working lives of the playwright and of Burke, a leading player in the London run of Copenhagen. The play itself concerns a mysterious 1941 meeting in the Nazi-occupied Danish capital between Werner Heisenberg, head of the covert Nazi nuclear program, and Niels Bohr (played by Burke), his former mentor. After the war, Heisenberg was interned by the British for six months at an estate called Farm Hall so the Allies might learn how far the German program had gotten events also covered in the play. This book concerns a mysterious package Frayn received during the play's London run, from "Celia Rhys-Evans," saying that she had seen the play, and that during a stay at Farm Hall in the '60s she had found some papers written in German that must be relevant. The crumpled papers appeared to make a joke about Ping-Pong and uranium 235. In true British style, it turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by Burke, revealed by a third person just as Frayn was about to go to the papers. Still with us? Most American readers won't be, though as Frayn and Burke trade chapters and it becomes clear who knew what when, there are plenty of verbal and intellectual pleasures to be had. (May 2) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This series of monologs in two acts is a collaboration between Frayn, the celebrated British author and playwright, and Burke, an actor in Frayn's Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen. This comic and intriguing drama grew out of Burke's skillful hoax about a mysterious package of manuscripts found at Farm Hill near London, where German nuclear physicists were interned after World War II. Because of his intense curiosity and the possible historic relevance of these incomprehensible German and Russian documents to his play, Frayn became the target of Burke's tricks. The plot thickens as more people become involved in the prankster's deception and the victim's search for truth. Finally, a conscientious second actor of the original cast exposes Burke's forgeries. For resolution, Frayn and Burke devised this ingenious book about human gullibility and the incomprehensibility of one's own behavior. Recommended for academic and public libraries as a companion to the original play. Ming-ming Shen Kuo, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An entertaining, if inconclusive, game of historical cat-and-mouse. Playwright and novelist Frayn (Head-Long, 1999, etc.) was in the midst of staging a new play, Copenhagen, when a curious package arrived in the mail. His play concerned a fateful but mysterious 1941 meeting between German scientist Werner Heisenberg (a key figure in the Nazi atomic-weapons program) and Danish physicist Neils Bohr; the package contained papers evidently found beneath the floorboards of an English country house where Heisenberg and other Nazi scientists had been interned at the end of WWII. As Frayn and director Burke puzzled through the papers, written in semiliterate German and even less literate Russian (or could it be Bulgarian?) and full of cryptic references to uranium, table tennis, and champagne, they concluded they'd either stumbled on a trove of hitherto unknown secret documents written in especially vexing code or had fallen victim to an especially crafty hoax masquerading as "a parody of a pedantic scientific paper." They incline toward the latter view for much of the narrative, although they're drawn toward the former by the arrival of a letter (apparently from the British government) demanding the surrender of the trove. By the end of the account (which the authors complicate by adding thoughtful red-herring notes on the art of theatrical deception and the psyche-bending qualities of the stage), the reader isn't quite sure what to make of the whole affair: if true, it offers a minor footnote in WWII history, and, if false, makes for at least a pleasant exercise for mystery buffs. Whatever the reality, it adds up to another good yarn from Frayn.