Copenhagen

Michael Frayn

Aug 2013 · BBC Digital Audio · Narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, Full Cast, Greta Scacchi, and Simon Russell Beale

About this audiobook

Benedict Cumberbatch, Greta Scacchi and Simon Russell Beale star in Michael Frayn's award-winning play about the controversial 1941 meeting between physicists Bohr and Heisenberg. Copenhagen, Autumn 1941. The two presiding geniuses of quantum physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg meet for the first time since the breakout of war. Danish physicist Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, live in Nazi-occupied Denmark; their visitor, Heisenberg, is German, the two old friends, now on opposing sides have between them the ability to change the course of history. Frayn's Tony award-winning play imagines the three characters re-drafting the events of 1941 in an attempt to make sense of them. With Greta Scacchi as Margrethe Bohr, Simon Russell Beale as Niels Bohr and Benedict Cumberbatch as Werner Heisenberg. This new version of Copenhagen is adapted for radio and directed by Emma Harding.

About the author

Michael Frayn is an award-winning novelist and playwright whose numerous stage plays include Alphabetical Order, Noises Off and Copenhagen (winner of the 1998 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year and the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play. Among his novels are Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong and Spies, which won the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize. He also wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed comedy film Clockwise, which starred John Cleese.