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A Theatre of Uncertainties: Science and History in Michael Frayn's ‘Copenhagen’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Victoria Stewart
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Abstract

A recurring strand over the past few years in New Theatre Quarterly has been the relationship between the nature of theatricality and scientific conceptions rooted in quantum mechanics – notably Chaos Theory and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This approach is questioned by scientists, who doubt the possibility of bridging the scientific and the literary uses of the metaphorical language being deployed. Michael Frayn's recent play, Copenhagen, used the crucial wartime visit paid by Heisenberg to Niels Bohr, his fellow architect of the Uncertainty Principle, to explore the scientific concepts involved through the work's own form and content. Victoria Stewart here assesses the nature and the success of Frayn's techniques in relation to the wider uncertainties of live theatrical performance as well as to the relationship between the scientific and artistic use of metaphor. The outcome, she concludes, is ‘a dialogue between two fields of discourse – science and theatre – which reveals that both necessarily deal in ambiguity and uncertainty of outcome’. Victoria Stewart lectures in English and Drama at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , November 1999 , pp. 301 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes and References

1. This article appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, X (1994), p. 242–54.

2. N. Katherine Hayles describes the difference between quantum mechanics and chaos theory as being at least in part one of scale: thus, the most familiar conceptualization of chaos theory is that of the butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world and causing a tidal wave in another. The relationship between cause and effect is here disturbed. On the other hand, ‘since quantum fluctuations are extremely small and tend to cancel each other out, they are often considered not to affect macroscale events to any appreciable extent’. Hayles, , ed., Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 11Google Scholar.

3. Phelan, Peggy, ‘The Theatre and its Mother: Tom Stoppard's Hapgood’, in Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p.112–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Heisenberg, Werner, Physics and Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 46Google Scholar.

5. George, David E. R., ‘Quantum Theatre, Potential Theatre: a New Paradigm?’, New Theatre Quarterly, V (1989), p. 171–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. The Uncertainty Principle established that the act of observation introduces uncertainty in the outcome of an experiment. Complementarity, developed by Bohr in response to the notion that light could appear to behave as either particle or wave, suggested that once the decision had been made as to which it was in the particular instance, then some predictions of its behaviour could be made.

7. Broderick, Damien, The Architecture of Babel: Discourses of Literature and Science (Melbourne University Press, 1994,) p. 102Google Scholar.

8. Frayn, Michael, Copenhagen (London: Methuen, 1998). p. 3Google Scholar.

9. Broderick, op. cit., p. 105–6.

10. See, for example, Heisenberg, op. cit., in which he explains many of his ideas in a relatively accessible fashion.

11. Frayn, op. cit., p. 12, 54, 88.

12. Ibid., p. 38.

13. Ibid., p. 71.

14. Cassidy, David C., Uncertainty: the Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (New York: Freeman, 1991), p. 438Google Scholar.

15. Frayn, op. cit., p.31.

16. Ibid., p. 35.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., p. 36.

19. Ibid., p. 38.

20. Ibid., p. 41.

21. Ibid., p.42.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., p. 43.

24. Ibid., p. 88.

25. Ibid., p. 95.

26. Ibid., p.25, 27. George, op. cit., p. 173.

27. Silverman, Toby has explored both the use of twins in the play and some of its other theatrical allusions in ‘Blizintsy/Dvojniki, Twins/Doubles, Hapgood/Hapgood’, Modern Drama, XXXV (1991), p. 312–21Google Scholar. This notion of a dynamic between diegetic and extra-diegetic effects of twins bears comparison with Shakespearean cross-gender doubling, especially as Hapgood plays her own twin.

28. Frayn's, interest in such issues is evidenced not only in his best-known play, Noises Off (1982)Google Scholar, but also in the more recent and conceptually more complex Look Look (1990).