Professor David Peimer
“Copenhagen”, A Play by Michael Frayn: Time to Reflect
Summary
Rosh Hashanah is a time for reflection, accountability, consequences, and actions. In that spirit, Professor David Peimer discusses Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen, which touches very profoundly on those same themes. The play is based on an event that occurred in Copenhagen in 1941, a meeting between the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, who had been Bohr’s student.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Oh, there’s a long story, but he became fascinated and obsessed and, I think, to his credit, totally, that he chose this and made it accessible and can stimulate such debate from a play. I love it when theatre can do that. It can be political. it can be anything that stimulates.