The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue - Softcover

Frayn, Michael; Burke, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312421249 ISBN 13: 9780312421243

Publisher: Picador, 2003

Synopsis

One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, winner of the Tony Award for best play in 1999, 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 the play. While Frayn began to lose all sense of certainty, actor David Burke, who played Niels Bohr in the London production and had some experience with documents of this sort, followed the action with particularly close interest. After the riddle was cracked and the fog had cleared, Frayn and Burke sat down together to ponder the winding trail of the Copenhagen papers.

By turns comic and profound, The Copenhagen Papers explores the conundrum at the heart of all Michael Frayn's work--human fallibility and the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Frayn is the author of the award-winning Copenhagen and twelve other plays, including Noises Off. The most recent of his ten novels is Spies.

David Burke is an actor who has worked extensively with Britain's National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

From 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.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0312421249
• ISBN 13: 9780312421243
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144