Copenhagen
Copenhagen and A Skull in Connemara at first seem as different in content as they are visually. A deeply serious philosophical drama, Copenhagen takes place in a sleek, sterile, brightly lit, bleached-wood lecture hall–an academic’s vision of heaven or limbo or Valhalla–in which the spirits of three long dead friends reenact and ruminate on key events in their lives. Raucous and sometimes raunchy, A Skull in Connemara is mostly set in a dark cemetery in the dead of night, where three men–very much alive and as earthy as the soil they shovel–disinter old bones to make way for new corpses.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
First produced in London in 1998 and arriving here as part of a national tour following a successful Broadway run in 2000, English dramatist Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen is an unabashedly speculative account of a much debated historical incident: a private meeting in 1941 between Nobel-winning physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Bohr, a half-Jewish Dane, was a dear friend and mentor to the younger Heisenberg starting in the 1920s. But the Nazi occupation of Denmark left the two estranged–especially since Heisenberg, a German, was in charge of his nation’s atomic-research program. For years after the war, that 1941 meeting was a matter of dispute. Why did Heisenberg come to Copenhagen? What did he say to Bohr, and why? And why did Bohr respond with extreme and lingering anger?
Frayn extends Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle (which, as every Jurassic Park fan knows, basically says that we alter whatever we attempt to study) to philosophy, history, and human relationships. He gives each character’s viewpoint its due, knowing that each viewer will interpret the play according to his or her own experience. What Margrethe says of Heisenberg is equally true of every audience member: “If it’s Heisenberg at the center of the universe, then the one bit of the universe that he can’t see is Heisenberg. So it’s no good asking him why he came to Copenhagen in 1941. He doesn’t know!”
But despite all the gallows humor and bitter satire, A Skull in Connemara ultimately conveys the same sense of loss, wonderment, and uncertainty as Copenhagen, thanks in large part to the fine performances of Si Osborne as Mick, John Gawlik as Thomas, Mike Thornton as Mairtin, and Mary Seibel as a booze-swilling, bingo-playing old woman whose suspicions that Mick is a murderer don’t keep her from cadging free servings of his poteen, a urine-colored homemade whiskey he serves in glass jars. Without giving away the details of McDonagh’s hairpin plot, I can say that Mick’s culpability in his wife’s death is never fully understood–by the audience, Mick’s neighbors, or Mick himself. The play’s final moment recalls Hamlet regarding the remains of Yorick, gazing into the impenetrable mystery of the human condition.
