Copenhagen by Michael Frayn and The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn and David Burke

Continuing the previous post’s theme of a play by Michael Frayn, here are two books connected to another Frayn play with a similarly historical bent.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (playscript)

The premise of Copenhagen is based on a historical event: in 1941, German physicist Werner Heisenberg travelled to Copenhagen — which at the time was under Nazi occupation — to meet with Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It is recorded that Heisenberg met with Bohr and Bohr’s wife Margrethe, and Bohr and Heisenberg later went out for a walk so they could speak without being overheard by the Gestapo. But when Bohr returned from the walk he was absolutely furious about something, and Heisenberg left shortly afterwards. Though Bohr and Heisenberg had been close friends for many years before that meeting, they barely spoke to each other again after that. The substance of the Bohr-Heisenberg conversation has never been fully explained. Some historians say that Heisenberg was attempting to recruit Bohr to help with the Nazi nuclear energy project (on which Heisenberg was working at the time) in exchange for academic reinstatement and advancement…even though Bohr was half-Jewish. The other, more sympathetic theory is that Heisenberg was trying to give Bohr information about the Nazi nuclear project in the hope that Bohr would be able to pass that information along to the Allies — essentially, that Heisenberg was trying to derail the Nazi attempt to build atomic weapons.

Frayn’s play takes both of these theories and weaves them together, never quite promoting one or the other but (intriguingly) connecting both theories to the principles of physics that both Bohr and Heisenberg were famous for creating: Bohr’s complementarity principle and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It’s an amazingly complex and multilayered play that only has three characters, Bohr and his wife and Heisenberg, and yet seems to contain many more voices than just those of two men and one woman.

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn and David Burke

The Copenhagen Papers was jointly written by Michael Frayn and by David Burke; the latter played Niels Bohr in the original London run of the play. The subject of the book is an elaborate practical joke that Burke played on Frayn during the run of the play, and the joke is complicated enough to require a short historical background even before I can summarise it. The history hinges on the fact that at the end of World War II, Werner Heisenberg and the other scientists who had been working on the Nazi nuclear energy programme were taken to England and interned at an out-of-the-way requisitioned house called Farm Hall, where they were closely watched and interviewed by British intelligence.

David Burke decided that he wanted to play a joke on Frayn, some kind of joke related to the play that Frayn had written. Burke began by inventing a woman named Celia Rhys-Evans, who had apparently lived in Farm Hall at some point during the 1960s and had discovered a number of documents hidden under the floorboards of the house. These documents were written in cryptic, barely legible German, which nevertheless seemed to hint that the captured scientists had been communicating with each other without the knowledge of their British captors. Burke enlisted the help of some friends to fake 50-year-old German documents, and then (as Celia Rhys-Evans) he sent a number of the faked papers to Frayn, along with a letter that asked if these old papers would be useful to him if he ever wanted to write another play.

Not only did Frayn believe that the documents were genuine, but he also began a correspondence with Mrs Rhys-Evans to see if there were any other documents she might have on hand that dealt with the captured scientists. And thus Frayn and Burke set out on a strange and occasionally journey where one forgery followed another and another. Neither was willing to let go of his side of the story, but as the correspondence continued they both became so immersed in the fiction that the whole thing nearly ended in an exhausted stalemate. In the end, Frayn actually had to be told that the whole thing was a hoax.

The Copenhagen Papers is an account of the whole joke from inception to discovery — the truth was revealed by a sympathetic friend who thought that the joke had gone too far. The book is meant to be an exploration of some of the themes touched on in Copenhagen the play: the uncertainty of history and historical evidence, the ambiguous nature of language, the questions that are raised every time we learn something new about the past and how it may have shaped the future…or in this case, the present. Frayn and Burke clearly seem to have come to an understanding over this incident, enough to write a book about it and treat it fairly dispassionately. And even if my historian side almost can’t help but writhe a little to read about a deliberate forging of historical documents for a joke, The Copenhagen Papers is an intriguing exploration of what it means to be present at the creation of ‘history’.

Democracy by Michael Frayn

This particular review is going to be more of a review of the play than of the playscript itself, but since I don’t normally buy playscripts, the fact that I’ve bought the latter is a sign of how much I would encourage anyone to see the former. (I’ve seen the play three times, twice in London and once in a touring company.) It’s one of those shows that I’ve a feeling I’ll try to see no matter when and where it’s being performed.

Democracy by Michael Frayn

Democracy is historical fiction…or rather, fictionalised history. It’s the story of Günter Guillaume, the East German spy who infiltrated the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Guillaume and his wife Christel, both officers of the Stasi, ‘escaped’ from East Germany in the early 1950s and spent several years building a cover for themselves as members of the SPD, the left-of-centre social democratic party in West Germany. Willy Brandt, formerly the mayor of West Berlin, became the first socialist Chancellor of Germany (since the 1930s) in October 1969. And by a stroke of good fortune (for the Stasi, at least), Guillaume gained a position in Brandt’s office shortly afterwards — and he eventually became Brandt’s personal assistant, with the kind of access to documents that would make any intelligence officer dizzy with delight. Democracy is mainly Guillaume’s story, but in a way is equally Brandt’s story, because the fortunes of the two men were so closely linked that the ups and downs of one seemed to spill over into the other.

Frayn’s play is fast-paced, a whirlwind of political life, showing how Guillaume has to bounce back and forth between his workday life in Brandt’s office and his clandestine meetings with his Stasi contact. Brandt’s private life is equally important to the play: Frayn’s depiction of Brandt’s frequent extramarital affairs with attractive journalists and party workers, his love of alcohol and bad jokes, and his ‘feverish colds’ (the accepted euphemism for his periodic cycles of depression) all combine to create an image of a deeply flawed but driven, almost hunted, political leader. The most tragic aspect of the whole story is the fact that Guillaume’s arrest and Brandt’s subsequent resignation was almost the last thing that the Stasi wanted. Brandt’s Ostpolitik had given East Germany a new standing in the international community, and Guillaume’s arrest was the equivalent of an own goal for East Germany. Democracy highlights this fact, and carries it through to the end of the play — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reuniting of Germany, and the final words from the play’s two protagonists:

BRANDT: We’re healed and whole. For a little while, at any rate. And for a little while everyone’s glad.
GUILLAUME: And wherever he goes, my shadow goes with him. Together still.

And in the stage production I saw, the lighting shifts to throw both men into shadow. A taller shadow for Brandt and a smaller one for Guillaume…but it is impossible to tell which one overlaps the other. It’s a fine and thought-provoking play, not least because it puts a fascinatingly personal dimension on the Cold War politics of East and West Germany.

Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum

I originally picked up a copy of this book as a gift for a friend, and ended up getting one for myself as well — mostly to prevent myself from reading the gift copy. Is ‘one owner/reader from new’ still acceptable as a gift book? I’m never really sure.

Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum

The English writer Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975) is probably best known for Jeeves, the inimitable gentleman’s gentleman, and his rather brainless but well-intentioned master Bertie Wooster. But the team of Jeeves and Wooster was only one facet of Wodehouse’s immense literary canon. He also wrote a series of stories centred around the antics of the denizens of Blandings Castle (many of which focus on the Empress of Blandings, a corpulent prize-winning pig), another group of stories about a dashing young City gentleman named Psmith (the ‘p’ is silent, as in ‘pneumonia’ and ‘ptarmigan’), as well as many other separate novels, short stories, and song lyrics — all of which add up to an immense volume of work for any one writer.

Wodehouse had a gift for devising elaborate farcical plots that often seem so complex as to be insoluble, and his prose is pretty much unforgettable to anyone who has dipped into even one or two of his works. And yet it’s incredible to think that Wodehouse never went to university — indeed, he spent the first few years of his working life writing stories late into the night and going to a dull, uninspiring job at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank by day. In person, he appears to have been singularly uninteresting, shy and asocial, and was almost incapable of taking any situation sufficiently seriously…or at least, he preferred to make light of difficulties and display a stereotypical sort of ’stiff-upper lip’ personality to the outside world. This last trait eventually caused no end of trouble for him in an episode that is not often remembered today. Wodehouse and his wife were stranded in occupied France during World War II, and while he was a prisoner in an enemy alien internment camp he was invited to make a series of radio broadcasts from Berlin about his life as an internee. Wodehouse’s attitude on the air was genial, almost jocular, and some of his innocent remarks led some members of the press and public to denounce him as a Nazi collaborator and propagandist along the lines of Lord Haw-Haw. After the war’s end, Wodehouse discovered that he was in deep disgrace — and that his public image had been severely damaged by his association with the Nazi propaganda machine.

That backstory aside, Robert McCrum’s biography of Wodehouse is superbly done, a detailed and well-crafted account of a literary life. If I had one reservation to make about the writing style, I would draw attention to the fact that McCrum seems to want to exonerate his subject at the expense of good prose-writing. He over-emphasises Wodehouse’s relative ignorance of international politics — or if not over-emphasises it, then at least is less than subtle in his description of it. Sentences like ‘This was the conversation that would lead inexorably to his disgrace’ feel a bit forced at times. (My instinctive reaction to a sentence like that is, ‘Yes, thank you, Story, now may we continue from where you left off?’) But that is to nitpick at what is otherwise a lovely and well-researched literary biography, definitely recommended to fans of the Wodehouse canon.

The Lord Chamberlain Regrets….:A History of British Theatre Censorship by Dominic Shellard, Steve Nicholson and Miriam Handley

I’ve been pulling together some research notes on various aspects of political censorship in relation to the publication of Richard Crossman’s diaries, and since I’m in a censorship sort of mood, here’s a book all about the power of blue pencils.

The Lord Chamberlain Regrets….:A History of British Theatre Censorship by Dominic Shellard, Steve Nicholson and Miriam Handley

Censorship is a subject that’s guaranteed to stir up passions, and theatre censorship touches a raw nerve at times. When politicians try to determine what the general public should and should not be allowed to see, one might say that the stage is set for a complicated drama — or quite possibly, a farce. From the early nineteenth century until Theatres Act of 1968, the Lord Chamberlain had the power to licence playscripts for performance in the major London theatres and in other theatres across Britain. Any playwright who was serious about having his or her work performed at a ‘quality’ theatre had to submit the play to the Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil. Numerous British playwrights found that their works were deemed unsuitable for performance unless they made specific changes to the text and/or content, removing reference to major religious figures or important living persons (particularly the royal family), toning down language or violence on stage, or even altering the nature of the relationship between characters (if homosexuality, for example, seemed to be an issue). W.S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame took pot-shots at the Lord Chamberlain’s power of licencing in one or two of his plays, and the very notion of having a theatre censor prompted criticism and scorn — either for there being too much or too little censorship of performances on stage. But the power (or the perceived power) of the Lord Chamberlain’s office often worked as a self-censoring device, where anxious playwrights would submit their ideas for consideration and approval even before sitting down to write a script.

The complicated relationship between the Lord Chamberlain’s office and the theatre world shaped the nature of British drama for over a century. The authors of The Lord Chamberlain Regrets… have gone back to the archives, digging through the records of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office to find the actual reports that were written about plays and the comments that were made about questionable content in such key dramas as George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (the ‘profession’ in question was fairly obvious to the audience), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (one audience member who wrote to the Lord Chamberlain to complain about the play described how it had given him nothing but two hours of ‘angry boredom’), and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (described as being like looking into ‘the anteroom of hell’). Yet some entries show the difficulty of dealing with other kinds of potentially controversial subject matter. Such was the case of J.W. Brannigan’s The Life of Christ, with which the censors could find no fault other than the fact that ‘Our Lord must not be impersonated on the stage’…and thus was not accepted for licence.

The book is a very good reference work for those interested in the history of censorship and the individual circumstances surrounding the censorship of certain plays and performances. I think that my lack of familiarity with theatre history was what kept me from enjoying the book more. Then again, not knowing anything about the plays themselves does help me to keep a more open mind about why certain plays received such a harsh treatment at the Lord Chamberlain’s hands. Oscar Wilde (who as might be expected features fairly prominently in this history) once quipped that there was no such thing as a moral or an immoral book; only a well-written or a badly-written book. I’m not so sure that the same can be entirely said of drama, but The Lord Chamberlain Regrets… offers the opportunity to examine just how concerns over morality affected the writing and performance of plays in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half (and a little more) of the twentieth.