Copenhagen

Name: Copenhagen
Brand: Penguin Random House UK
Availability: InStock
Author: Michael Frayn
ISBN: 9781471346699

Author: Michael Frayn

Narrator: Benedict Cumberbatch, Full Cast, Greta Scacchi, Simon Russell Beale

Unabridged: 1 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: BBC Digital Audio

Published: 08/01/2013

Categories: Nonfiction, Performing Arts, Radio

Synopsis

Benedict Cumberbatch, Greta Scacchi and Simon Russell Beale star in Michael Frayn's award-winning play about the controversial 1941 meeting between physicists Bohr and Heisenberg. Copenhagen, Autumn 1941. The two presiding geniuses of quantum physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg meet for the first time since the breakout of war. Danish physicist Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, live in Nazi-occupied Denmark; their visitor, Heisenberg, is German, the two old friends, now on opposing sides have between them the ability to change the course of history. Frayn's Tony award-winning play imagines the three characters re-drafting the events of 1941 in an attempt to make sense of them. With Greta Scacchi as Margrethe Bohr, Simon Russell Beale as Niels Bohr and Benedict Cumberbatch as Werner Heisenberg. This new version of Copenhagen is adapted for radio and directed by Emma Harding.

About Michael Frayn

Michael Frayn is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling Headlong, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection and a Booker Prize finalist, and Spies, which received the Whitbread Novel Award. He has also written a memoir, My Father's Fortune, and fifteen plays, among them Noises Off and Copenhagen, which won three Tony Awards. He lives just south of London.

Reviews

Goodreads review by EveStar91 on August 17, 2025

Bohr: But the question is always, What does the mathematics mean, in plain language? What are the philosophical implications? Michael Frayn tries to explore the personal aspects of Heisenberg's visit to the Bohr couple during the second world war in the play Copenhagen, delving into the psyche of the......more

Goodreads review by Manny on May 11, 2011

- So what did you think? - I liked it! A lot of really interesting historical stuff about the Bohr/Heisenberg/Schrödinger triangle. And I just had no idea about Heisenberg's involvement in the Nazi nuclear project. Fascinating. Can't imagine how I missed reading about that earlier. - Ah, come on Geor......more

Goodreads review by Paul on September 03, 2021

I have been listening to a few old plays this weekend and this one really touched me. It’s the story of German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s visit to Danish physicist Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. The two had worked on quantum mechanics and revolutionized atomic physics in the past, but now the......more

Goodreads review by Dave on August 01, 2024

Since I had just read Benjamin Labutat's study of the intersection between theoretical physics, politics and ethics, When We Cease to Understand the World, and in the light of the recent film Oppenheimer, I recalled reading and seeing this play, Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn about a meeting between N......more