By Michael Frayn
Directed by Tony Cownie

A chain reaction. You tell one painful truth and it leads to two more.

This intense, absorbing and powerful piece of theatre from Michael Frayn brings our 2008/09 Season to a pulsating end.

In 1941, at the height of the Second World War, German physicist Werner Heisenberg travelled to Copenhagen to visit his friend, collegue and mentor Niels Bohr. But with Denmark under Nazi occupation, Heisenberg leading the German nuclear programme and the half-Jewish Bohr one of the leading experts on atomic physics, the question is - why did he come?

This ill-fated meeting splintered their friendship, and provoked decades of speculation and debate. Driven to explore the boundaries of science, these men were also placed by history in a time when their work could and would cause unthinkable suffering and horror. So what were Heisenberg’s real motives? Did he really want to put the atom bomb in Hitler’s grasp?

Cast and Credits