The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue

By Michael Frayn and David Burke

Book Overview

In a brilliant coda to the play Copenhagen , Michael Frayn receives mysterious letters that take him back to the theme of his bestselling novel, Headlong -- human folly, this time his own. Michael Frayn's Copenhagen has established itself as one of the finest pieces of drama to grace the stage in recent years. The subject of the Tony-winning play is the strange visit the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg made to his former mentor, scientist Niels Bohr, in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and the quarrel that ensued. Heisenberg's intentions on that visit, for good or for evil, have long intrigued and baffled historians and scientists. One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, Frayn received a curious package from a suburban housewife, which contained a few faded pages of barely legible German writings. These pages, which she claimed to have found concealed beneath her floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of play. As more material emerged -- specifically notes that appeared to give instructions on how to put up a table-tennis table but perhaps containing important encoded information -- actor David Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, began to display extreme, even suspicious interest in Frayn's growing obsession with cracking the riddle of the papers. And Frayn, for his part, lost all sense of certainty. Was he the victim of an elaborate hoax? By turns comic and profound, The Copenhagen Papers explores the conundrum that is always at the heart of Frayn's work -- human gullibility and the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805067523
• ISBN13: 9780805067521
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.6" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

Celia`s Secret

Synopsis Who is Celia, and what are the mysterious papers found concealed under the attic floorboards of an old country house? Are they simply instructions for assembling a table-tennis table, written in idiosyncratic German, or could they contain a coded message?

A Sly Meditation On The Nature Of Reality

This is a marvellous entertainment - I'm not sure whether I should correctly describe it as either a memoir or novelette - which explores the nature of reality. It's not really a sequel to Michael Frayn's splendid play "Copenhagen", but does delve into some of the same terrain as the play. Instead, it is a witty exchange of thoughts and letters sent between Michael Frayn and actor David Burke (He portrayed physicist Niels Bohr during the play's original London production) about a set of manuscripts which allegedly date from the internment of German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues at Farm Hall immediately after the end of World War II. What follows is a terse, spellbinding mystery which is well told by both writers, replete with ample doses of English humor.

Not What I Expected

I thought COPENHAGEN was a great play, and I picked up thisbook thinking it was background for the play (the bookjacketgives some hints that that isn't the case, but I didn't botherto read that. Anyway, it turns out to be less than that, andalso much more. I was sucked into the mystery along withMichael Frayn, and read it in one sitting (it's short). Ihighly recommend it for pure entertainment.