Copenhagen
The Science of war
Janice Sawka

“This play is peculiar to itself.”

Hardly a glowing recommendation for Copenhagen, the production opening the 2005-06 Prairie Theatre Exchange season — until you consider you are speaking to Scott Hylands, an actor whose 40-year biography overflows with plays centring on powerfully peculiar, strong male characters.

Specifically, Hylands has acted in Oleanna, Amadeus, Art and blue/orange. If peculiarities make the individual, and if individualism is to be celebrated, then this is the guy to do it.

Hylands graduated with a degree in directing from the University of British Columbia theatre program in 1964, then promptly moved to the United States, smack into the draft-dodging issues of the Vietnam War. He was called up but was considered 4F — unfit for service.

“I’d been educated to have an inquiring mind. That’s why the mind is there,” he says. “But in recruiting terms, that made me opinionated, less likely to follow orders and generally a walking pain in the ass. Add to that the fact my father had been killed in World War Two, and the assessment was psychological inappropriateness...

“But being educated certainly took the mystique out of heroism. I saw men who came back from Vietnam emotionally wounded. I remembered my own childhood, when people would tell me not to ask my uncle about the war. I’d always assumed it was because he’d seen terrible things. As an adult, I realized it was more likely because he’d done terrible things. War sets people up to do that.”

These sentiments certainly inform Hylands role in Copenhagen, in which he portrays Danish physicist Neils Bohr, who has a secret meeting with his German counterpart, Werner Heisenberg, in 1941. Their separate work will later lead to the development of the atomic bomb. The play is based on a true meeting between these men, but what was said at that meeting is unknown.

“They knew their premises were being bugged by the Nazis and likely the Danes as well, so they did their heavy discussions while out on long walks,” Hylands explains. “All that’s known is that one of these walks ended abruptly with these two men, who’d been good friends and colleagues for years, suddenly becoming adversaries.”

The play ponders what may have happened by repeating this pivotal moment and events leading up to it from different viewpoints — Heisenberg’s, Bohr’s, and also the perspective of Bohr’s wife, Margrethe.

“Bohr is the humanist who sees the possible philosophical implications. Heisenberg, who is actually more brilliant then his mentor, Bohr, is too interested in the academic thrill of discovery to bother with moral issues. It’s not that he’s cruel, it’s just that, in wartime, the mentality is that the bad guys are always on the other side, and the function of science is to invent better killing stuff for your side.”

So does this make Copenhagen a total downer? Hylands doesn’t think so — at least not completely.

“Times are troubled these days, just like in 1941. Iraq. Global warming making the climate unstable. Everyone has a little sense that the screws are tightening… but this play will certainly generate discussion, and discussion of larger issues, which sparks good things. It certainly beats the uselessness of never asking anything stronger than stuff like ‘Where are my socks?’”