Reading and performing uncertainty: Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and the postdramatic theatre

Michael Frayn's play about quantum mechanics, memory and history, Copenhagen, has taken a lot Of criticism for 'misrepresenting' its historical characters, primarily Werner Heisenberg. This essay analyses the dramaturgy of the play and argues for a postdramatic reading in which questions of representation are dissolved by formal strategies that ally themselves with the thematics of the work. The text is viewed as a hybrid, somewhere between the dramatic and the postdramatic, set, as it is, in a fictional afterlife where conventional human categories no longer function. The postdramatic theatre, in refusing to interpret text, becomes a viable mode for performance in that the indeterminacy Of meaning on stage equates with the uncertainty principle that lies at the scientific and moral heart of Copenhagen.