“Albert, stop telling God what to do.”
– Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in conversation
All roads, it suddenly seems, lead to Texas. Everywhere I go, there’s another weblogger headed to Austin for SxSW, and I can’t help but suddenly feel tragically unhip as I realize that the most interesting I have to do this weekend is buying a couple of pairs of pants and maybe seeing a movie. Besides, Austin is a really neat town to visit (unless they’ve changed it in the two years since I was there), and I don’t get to see enough of my friend Sharon who lives there.
I also didn’t get to see — how’s that for lamest segue ever? — Copenhagen when a production came to Penn State in mid-February. My parents saw it on Broadway though, and I think it’s partly the fact that they liked it so much that led me to read playwright Michael Frayn’s defense of the play in this month’s New York Review of Books. He writes, in part:
One of the most striking comments on the play was made by Jochen Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg’s son, when I met him, to my considerable alarm, after the première of the play in New York. “Of course, your Heisenberg is nothing like my father,” he told me. “I never saw my father express emotion about anything except music. But I understand that the characters in a play have to be rather more forthcoming than that.”
This seems to me a chastening reminder of the difficulties of representing a real person in fiction, but a profoundly sensible indication of the purpose in attempting it, which is surely to make explicit the ideas and feelings that never quite get expressed in the confusing onrush of life, and to bring out the underlying structure of events. I take it that the nineteenth-century German playwright Friedrich Hebbel was making a similar point when he uttered his great dictum (one that every playwright ought to have engraved over his desk): “In a good play everyone is right.” I assume he means by this not that the audience is invited to approve of everyone’s actions, but that everyone should be allowed the freedom and eloquence to make the most convincing case that he can for himself. Whether or not this is a universal rule of playwriting it must surely apply to this particular play, where a central argument is about our inability, in our observation of both the physical world and the mental, ever to escape from particular viewpoints.