Celia's Secret: The Copenhagen Papers - Hardcover

Frayn, Michael; Burke, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571205305 ISBN 13: 9780571205301

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2000

Synopsis

One day during the run of Michael Fryan's play Copenhagen, a curious letter arrived from a housewife in Chiswick. She enclosed a few faded pages of barely legible German which she thought might have some relevance to the mystery at the play's heart. They turned out to mark the start of a long and winding trail. The subject of Copenhagen is the strange visit that the German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, made to his former Danish colleague, Niels Bohr in 1941. The two old friends now found themselves on opposite sides in a world war, and Heisenberg could not explain to Bohr that he was running the Nazis' secret atomic programme. His intentions have intrigued and baffled historians, and the hitherto unpublished German documents which Celia Rhys-Evans now began to send Michael Frayn cast a remarkable new light on certain aspects of the story. The gradual emergence of these papers was followed with particularly close interest by the actor, David Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, and who had happened to have a wide experience of documents of this sort. When it was all over David Burke and Michael Frayn sat down together, rather as Bohr and Heisenberg do in the play, to try to unravel the mystery, and, like Bohr and Heisenberg, to confront once again the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

About this title

Review

Michael Frayn's Copenhagen has established itself as one of the finest pieces of drama to grace the London stage in recent years. The play deals with the encounter between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941, and the riddle of their quarrel and pursuit of the riddle of atomic fission. Following the war, Heisenberg and other German scientists were interned for six months by British Intelligence at Farm Hall in Huntingdonshire. In Copengahen Bohr is played by David Burke, whose performance, according to Frayn, "had been quite remarkable, and his incarnation of Bohr's celebrated combination of percipience and innocence, of toughness and lovability, had moved me deeply".

As Frayn, Burke and the rest of the cast prepared to transfer the play into the West End, Frayn received a package of yellowing papers from a woman by the name of Celia Rhys-Evans, which to his excitement provided "a completely new source of information about Farm Hall, and they cast an astonishing new light on the story".

Before long Frayn is seduced by Celia's Secret, and becomes increasingly obsessed with unravelling the bizarre collection of papers which Celia discovered under the floorboards of Farm Hall years earlier. As Frayn tries to decipher Celia's package, he feels a sense of being sucked into his own fictions, realising that one of the themes of Copenhagen is "the baffling irreconcilability of so much of the historical evidence". He also realises that his frustration with cracking the papers starts to resemble the behaviour of Martin Clay, the protagonist of Frayn's novel Headlong. However, as the book unfolds it becomes clear that neither Celia nor David Burke are quite what they seem. Celia's Secret is a delightful literary practical joke at Frayn's expense, but some readers may find it a little self-indulgent. --Jerry Brotton

Book Description

In Celia's Secret: The Copenhagen Papers the novelist Michael Frayn and the actor David Burke combine brilliantly to tell a fascinating and thought provoking story of codes, secrets and espionage.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0571205305
• ISBN 13: 9780571205301
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128