It is the wrong season to see this play. I'm thinking of warm countries, a week in Sitges at the end of the month, making pasta with roast vegetables....
But Michael Frayn's Copenhagen is on television again, and the last time I didn't get to see it from the beginning. The intricacy, the overlapping conceptual, dramatic, political, and personal spirals, are much clearer – and thereby more beautiful....
Exquisite. You can feel the cool beauty of København, its polished tiny gardens, its sense of carefully outlined, graceful spaces – I love that city so much, though I haven't seen it in a while. And the reference to the saving of the Danish Jews – something the Danes themselves are so cool about, so offhand: one of the great saving beauties of the war, but when I mentioned it there they just said, Oh, we should have done it earlier.... But it is the wrong season to become enchanted with that city – I must save it for the fall, save it for a cooler time of year.
(I still think this play is only as good as the equivalent Stoppard plays – Arcadia, Invention of Love, maybe Hapgood, and so on. But for some reason the London critics love Frayn more than Stoppard – perhaps because he's One Of Them, and thoroughly English, and... well who knows what else. But Stoppard does this even better, I still insist.)
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