Word: fraynã
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...most explicit attempt to address QM in literature can be found in Michael Frayn??s play “Copenhagen,” which imagines and reimagines the enigmatic meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the Nazi-occupied Denmark of 1941. Heisenberg was working on the Nazi nuclear project (either on a bomb or a reactor—we still don’t know); Bohr was a Dane, and would later flee due to his Jewish ancestry. The meeting ended badly, and the two, once the best of friends, never spoke again...
This is exactly where Frayn??s play (which, for the record, I enjoyed) fails. “Copenhagen” outlines an “irritable reaching after fact & reason” as Bohr and Heisenberg search to accurately reconstruct their fateful meeting. But every time they get one part of the story down, another part becomes immeasurable—pseudo-uncertainty relations. The play ends with nothing resolved, the characters having accepted the “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.” But it’s a stretch...
...Michael Frayn??s Noises Off, which played in the Adams Pool the past two weekends, is one of those backstage comedies in which the personal problems of a set of actors slowly but surely spill over into the play within a play that they’re performing. Noises Off’s offstage world runs like a fast-paced sex comedy: the leading actor has just been abandoned by his wife, another cast member is convinced that his girlfriend is cheating on him, and the director is sleeping with both an actress and the stage manager. Nothing...
...alcoholic actor, an irate audience, and an unplanned pregnancy—all while they’re trying to keep quiet to avoid disrupting the action onstage. Any company would be proud of this production’s skill with the gag coordination and choreography called for in Frayn??s script, but the act’s pacing in this staging was so breakneck that a considerable proportion of the jokes flew past either without being noticed or understood. While it’s unlikely that any production could pull off this act in such a way that...
While in London, I also was able to catch the Broadway-bound revival of Michael Frayn??s hysterical farce, Noises Off. The play remains one of the funniest stage delights ever conceived, and the fact that its author also composed the constantly gripping and intellectually stimulating Copenhagen speaks volumes for his across-the-board talent...
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