In Brief:
Trinity Western University’s School of the Arts, Media + Culture (SAMC) presents Copenhagen, a three-time Tony Award-winning play by Michael Frayn. The play speculates on what took place during a series of private meetings between atomic physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr during WWII and the race to build the first atomic bomb. The play runs November 21 to December 2, 2017. Performances take place Tuesdays to Saturdays at 7:30pm, with additional performances on Saturdays at 2pm, in the Robert N. Thompson Building on the Trinity Western University campus. For tickets and details, visit www.twu.ca/theatre or call 604.513.2188.
Copenhagen contemplates the question: who is responsible for the bomb?
At the height of German victories during WWII, the world’s scientists are locked in a race to build the first atomic bomb. Risking arrest, German physicist Werner Heisenberg travels to Nazi-occupied Copenhagen to meet in private with his former mentor, Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Bohr, a Jew, is justifiably rankled. As it turns out, his old friend and collaborator now heads up the German nuclear program.
What takes place during the closed-door meetings? History will never know, but it forms the intriguing crux of this three-time Tony Award-winning thriller the New York Times calls “… the most ingenious play of ideas in many a year… endlessly fascinating.”
Set in an imagined “afterlife,” Heisenberg, Bohr, and Bohr’s wife, Margrethe debate the events of the evenings, for in life neither men could agree on just why Heisenberg had come to Copenhagen. Was Heisenberg defending his work for the state, trying to needle information from Bohr on Allied progress—or attempting to pull off something much riskier by proposing sabotage?
“I can’t think of anything more dramatic than watching two physicists take steps that may or may not result in giving Adolf Hitler access to a nuclear arsenal,” says Copenhagen director, Lloyd Arnett, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Theatre at TWU. With current political posturing from North Korea reminding us that the reality and spectre of nuclear war hangs over us still, Arnett says the play ultimately wrestles with the moral choices we all face making in our lives.
Copenhagen runs November 21 – December 2, 2017 in the Robert N. Thompson building on the TWU campus in Langley, British Columbia. Tickets are available at www.twu.ca/theatre. The play is written by Michael Frayn, directed by Lloyd Arnett, Ph.D., with lighting design by Graham Ockley, stage management by Uliana Akulenko, and performances by Emmett Hanly, Jane Oliphant, and Steven Simpson.
Founded in 1962, Trinity Western University is a private Christian post-secondary institution in Langley, British Columbia. It is a fully accredited university offering liberal arts and sciences, as well as professional schools in business, nursing, education, human kinetics, graduate studies, and arts, media and culture.
For more information
Angela Lee
Senior Marketing and Communications Specialist
Trinity Western University
604-513-2027 x 3191
angela.lee@twu.ca