Celia's Secret: The Copenhagen Papers Book

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 BrottonRead More