The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue

by Michael Frayn, David Burke

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312421243
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/04/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	766,991
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.33(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

A deliciously intricate, whimsically philosophical little intrigue. . .The greatest fun of The Copenhagen Papers is the companionship of Mr. Frayn and Mr. Burke, who take turns writing chapters and display plenty of wry British charm.” —The New York Times

“Comic and intriguing. . .[an] ingenious book about human gullibility and the incomprehensibility of one's own behavior.” —Library Journal

“An entertaining. . .game of historical cat-and-mouse. . . another good yarn from Frayn.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

. . . a deliciously intricate, whimsically philosophical little intrigue that, in Frayn's view especially, mockingly duplicates some of the themes of the play Copenhagen.
— New York Times

Richard Bernstein

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. (May 2) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This series of monologs in two acts is a collaboration between Frayn, the celebrated British author and playwright, and Burke, an actor in Frayn's Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen. This comic and intriguing drama grew out of Burke's skillful hoax about a mysterious package of manuscripts found at Farm Hill near London, where German nuclear physicists were interned after World War II. Because of his intense curiosity and the possible historic relevance of these incomprehensible German and Russian documents to his play, Frayn became the target of Burke's tricks. The plot thickens as more people become involved in the prankster's deception and the victim's search for truth. Finally, a conscientious second actor of the original cast exposes Burke's forgeries. For resolution, Frayn and Burke devised this ingenious book about human gullibility and the incomprehensibility of one's own behavior. Recommended for academic and public libraries as a companion to the original play. Ming-ming Shen Kuo, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

An entertaining, if inconclusive, game of historical cat-and-mouse. Playwright and novelist Frayn (Head-Long, 1999, etc.) was in the midst of staging a new play, Copenhagen, when a curious package arrived in the mail. His play concerned a fateful but mysterious 1941 meeting between German scientist Werner Heisenberg (a key figure in the Nazi atomic-weapons program) and Danish physicist Neils Bohr; the package contained papers evidently found beneath the floorboards of an English country house where Heisenberg and other Nazi scientists had been interned at the end of WWII. As Frayn and director Burke puzzled through the papers, written in semiliterate German and even less literate Russian (or could it be Bulgarian?) and full of cryptic references to uranium, table tennis, and champagne, they concluded they'd either stumbled on a trove of hitherto unknown secret documents written in especially vexing code or had fallen victim to an especially crafty hoax masquerading as "a parody of a pedantic scientific paper." They incline toward the latter view for much of the narrative, although they're drawn toward the former by the arrival of a letter (apparently from the British government) demanding the surrender of the trove. By the end of the account (which the authors complicate by adding thoughtful red-herring notes on the art of theatrical deception and the psyche-bending qualities of the stage), the reader isn't quite sure what to make of the whole affair: if true, it offers a minor footnote in WWII history, and, if false, makes for at least a pleasant exercise for mystery buffs. Whatever the reality, it adds up to another good yarn from Frayn.

Kirkus Reviews