Time well spent (2000)

Theatre Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three Days of Rain. Donmar Warehouse, London.

What lessons can we draw from the past? At a time when some academics, shamefully unaware of their unwitting attachment to the ideological apparatus of capitalism, claim that history is dead, contemporary playwrights are much concerned with the conclusions we draw from events long ago. In the last year or so I have seen plays by Tom Stoppard (Arcadia), Michael Frayn (Copenhagen—see Socialist Standard, September 1998), Peter Barnes (Dreaming—Socialist Standard, August 1999) and Stephen Poliakoff (Remember This—Socialist Standard, December 1999), all of which conclude that the past very much determines what takes place in the present. And now Richard Greenberg, a young American whose work has not previously been seen in Britain, offers us a splendid new play in which the past is ever present.

Three Days of Rain involves only three actors. In the first act we meet brother and sister, Walker and Nan, together with Pip, the son of their father’s business partner in an architects’ consultancy. In the second act the same actors play Walker and Nan’s father and mother, and Theo, their father’s business partner. And as the second act unfolds it becomes apparent why Walker, Nan and Pip are as they are. Not, I hasten to add, in any crude deterministic fashion, Greenberg’s imagination is far too subtle for that. Rather we are aware of the impact that one generation makes on the next: of the way in which behaviour is affected by the complex chemistry of both nature and nurture. Act 1 offers us a view of the past in which Walker, Ned and Pip strive to understand the behaviours of their parents trying to make sense of diaries and remembered anecdotes. And Act 2 shows, us with both drama and poignancy, that if you don’t have enough evidence and you don’t understand the context, you will reach the wrong conclusions.

The play is a warm, intelligent one, by turns touching, sensitive and funny, which is marvellously played in the small, 250-seater, Donmar Warehouse Theatre in Covent Garden. It is a play which points to the dangers of judging a person’s contribution on the basis of their family life, their relations with their children, and so on. If we are to understand people’s lives we need to have access to all the relevant evidence. The personal behaviour of the architect fathers of Walker, Nan and Pip cannot be inferred from their buildings, even though the latter command universal praise. Francis Wheen’s recent biography of Karl Marx makes much the same point. Marx’s contribution to the history of western though cannot be judged by his rather fey attempts to live a bourgeois life in mid-Victorian London.

Postscript

The following three plays—all of which have been reviewed in this journal—are still playing in London. All can be seen for less than half the cost of a ticket to a Premier League football match. All have something to say to socialists. All are highly recommended at the turn of the century.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (Duchess Theatre) “Michael Frayn has written one of the best plays about science and society that it has been my pleasure to see.”

Summerfolk by Maxim Gorki (National Theatre. Reviewed October 1999). “Summerfolk is as relevant today as it has ever been. I hope to find an early opportunity to see the play again and to marvel at the skill of the actors and the wonder of its staging.”

The Weir by Conor McPherson (Royal Court Theatre. Reviewed April 1998). “Valerie’s revelation serves both to underscore the emptiness at the heart of their lives and to offer an alternative which might be reached through honest, open discourse, about matters of real concern, managed in an empathetic manner . . . This is theatre at its most sublime.”

Michael Gill

Science, Uncertainty and the Bomb (1998)

Theatre Review from the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. National Theatre.

Michael Frayn, whose previous work has won him a trio of coveted "Best Comedy of the Year" awards (for Make and Break, Alphabetical Order, and the hilarious Noises Off), has, perhaps unexpectedly, fashioned a wonderful play about science which is full of ambiguity and paradox. Its focus is atomic physics, hardly the most accessible of subjects. But such are Frayn's linguistic skills that the audience has little difficulty in following narrative, and what emerges is a compelling play about how science is done, and the way that the scientific enterprise-like other behaviour-is mediated by the personalities of those involved. In the process Frayn has written one of the best plays about science and society that it has been my pleasure to see, and one which is marvellously realised on the stage of the Cottlesloe Theatre.

In 1941, in the Second World War, Nils Bohr, the so-called "father of atomic physics", met Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen. Heisenberg had been Bohr's research assistant in the mid-1920s, and together they had developed two of the key insights of modern atomic theory: the complementarity hypothesis (Bohr) and, especially, the uncertainty principle (Heisenberg). Uncertainty is one of those common scientific ideas (chaos is another) which has become part of the common currency of language, and in doing so has lost much of its original meaning. The uncertainty principle does not suggest that the behaviour of, for example, electrons is unknowable, but rather that "what is limited is the simultaneous measurement of connected variables such as position and momentum, or energy and time". The more precisely you measure one variable (such as the position of an electron), the less certain can you be of the value to attach to the second variable (such as "its speed").

What Frayn has done is to examine the uncertainties which lie behind Heisenberg's apparent motivations. Why did he, a German working on research into nuclear fission, journey to Copenhagen in 1941, to speak to his previous professor, a citizen of a country occupied by Germans? Drawing on biographical and autobiographical records he has fashioned a handful of separate explanations, all but the last of which have already been explored reasonably fully in various publications. Frayn doesn't suggest that our thoughts and motivations are specified as pairs of variables, but rather that a person's thoughts and motivations "cannot be established more clearly than he or she is willing to state them". Frayn wants to know whether Heisenberg (or indeed anyone else) really understands with any certainty the basis of their own thoughts and motivations.

What emerges is a picture of two scientists, previous colleagues, who find themselves caught up in the race to build the atomic bomb. (A year after their conversation in Copenhagen, Bohr was spirited out of Denmark and transported to the United States where he became a key member of the team which successfully built the first atomic weapon.) The evidence seems to suggest that Heisenberg perhaps deliberately mislead the German authorities about the difficulties which faced the research team, and as a result knowingly prevented the likelihood of Germany producing the bomb first. After the end of the war he and his team were captured by the British and brought to Britain, apparently to prevent them handing on any secrets to the French and Russians. And in a postscript Frayn describes the horror with which Heisenberg first heard of the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb. We cannot be certain but it appears that were it not for Heisenberg's common humanity either London, or Paris, or Amsterdam might have been devastated rather than Hiroshima. Such is the murderous way in which the scientific enterprise is used by capitalism. The profits of the few must always matter more than the lives of the many. About that there can be no uncertainty.

Michael Gill