This is the title of a fantastic play by English playwright Michael Frayn, written in 1998, which I saw recently at Theatre Inconnu, located across the street from the Belfry in the community of Fernwood. Theatre Inconnu is a small theatre, and the seating was arranged roughly in a circle around the level floor staging area.
Being my first time at Theatre Inconnu, at first I didn’t think this seating arrangement would work, especially with two wooden pillars located 15 feet apart in the centre of the staging area partially obscuring the view. Much to my delight, however, I discovered quickly that the intimate setting increased the sense of audience/actor interaction.
In my view, plays are such a wonderful experience largely because there is frequently genuine interaction between the audience and the actors, and in this case the setting at Theatre Inconnu intensified this interaction and the sense that we, as audience members, were part of the play. Indeed there were times when, from where I sat, I had to move my feet out of the way as the actors moved about the floor, encirling one another in a variety of configurations, much like the electrons of atoms that were of such critical importance to the play’s subject matter. Occasionally one is aware that the actors make eye contact with the audience members and similarly, being seated in a circle, all audience members can see each other in the background of the play, their attentions continuously shifting from actor to actor, to audience members briefly perhaps, then back to actor and actor, and then perhaps, for some, briefly to question their own presence as raised by the characters themselves: “the one person, among all, whom you cannot see is yourself” said Neils Bohr, or Margretta Bohr, or Werner Heisenberg in the play, I cannot remember which, or perhaps all three.
This interaction between audience and actors was all the more palpable in the context of the intricate interplay among the characters themselves: Niels Bohr, his wife Margretta, and Werner Heisenberg. Margretta, having typed the physics manuscripts of Neils Bohr tirelessly, has come to understand much of Bohr’s physics and the wartime politics of which Niels and Werner were embroiled: she is both an observer of and participant in the tensions between Neils and Werner who were at once wonderful friends, but doomed to mutual mistrust for representing opposing efforts during World War II, and a meeting of the two in Copenhagen during which it became clear to both that each represented opposing sides: Heisenberg for Germany, and Bohr, living in occupied Denmark and whose mother was Jewish, for the allies. Their efforts were each to understand the effects of nuclear fission – those effects that could lead to the creation of an atomic bomb and all of its attendant implications – and the precise quantities of certain substances that would allow for the efficient production of such a bomb.
But the interplay was yet more subtle, revealing the genius of Michael Frayn in his appreciation and application of basic principles of quantum theory. Heisenberg, German and staunchly nationalistic, proved by rigorous mathematics that certain sub-atomic, quantum, events cannot both be measured for their location and speed simultaneously – to know one with certainty is to lose information about the other. You can know one, he said, but never both at the same time – Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg developed his principle in the context of contemporaneous findings that electrons must be viewed as both particles and waves; that the distribution of electrons is understandable according only to probabilities, and that the act of observation has a direct effect on electron trajectories.
Frayn deftly weaves these principles, and others of quantum physics, into the fabric of his play. Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, at once friends and yet diametrically opposed, each can affect the outcome of the war: whichever side first develops the nuclear bomb wins it with catastrophic consequences. There are two possible outcomes – the outcome is particle or wave, dead or alive, victory for the allies or victory for Germany; their trajectories uncertain, perhaps measurable according to the choices made by each, perhaps by the observer Margretta, and if one of two coordinates is known that might allow for certainty of action, the other becomes elusive.
In the end, did Heisenberg, by his own choice, provide false information to the Nazi authorities about the proper quantities required to produce a nuclear bomb, or was he simply wrong in his calculations? Despite his German nationalism, did his own self-observation trigger the collapse of probabilities into one certainty – victory for the allies?
These are the questions that Frayn supremely grapples with, set among the multi-layered interactions of the three characters encircling one another, sometimes around Margretta, who watches them both; sometimes Bohr and Heisenberg together, sometimes colliding and repulsed to opposite ends of the stage.
This was a tour de force of playwriting genius, staged brilliantly by Director Clayton Jevne and Victoria actors, Naomi Simpson as Margretta, Eric Holmgren as Werner Heisenberg and Richard Patterson as Neils Bohr. Each had an immense amount of dialogue to remember, set in the intimacy and immediacy of their audience, heightening the acting challenge and concentration required.
For a layperson afficionado of basic quantum theory and a lover of theatre, I feel privileged to have seen such a brilliant play and performance.
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