Copenhagen is a challenging play for an audience in that its focus on quantum mechanical theory is often highly complex and its setting elusive since it slips from the autumn of 1941 to afterlife, from present to remembered past with few time signals.

There are just three actors, all constantly on stage, two of them conversing in a series of highly technical and closely argued scientific dialogues.

It’s therefore also highly challenging for the most seasoned professional directors and actors since the play has almost zero popular appeal.

That proved to be the case on the first night of Sheilagh Robertson’s production of Michael Frayn’s difficult and esoteric play.

Am I glad I saw it? Absolutely. Under her direction, actors Owain Johnston-Barnes as Niels Bohr, Christine Whitestone as Margarethe Bohr and Brendon Fourie as Werner Heisenberg, did a really good job in realising this complex work for us, even if a lot of the technical discussions were beyond the audience’s ken.

The play addresses several important questions: why did Werner Heisenberg leave his cushy job as head of the Nazi atomic bomb project to undertake a dangerous wartime voyage to visit his old mentor Niels Bohr and his wife in German-occupied Denmark?

Why did the two men quarrel during the visit? And perhaps most important, who was most morally responsible for the destruction caused by the atomic bombing of Japan?

And the answers? While there were no clear answers, Heisenberg’s realisation that his nice, harmless old mentor, because of his later work on the Manhattan Project, is effectively a mass murderer was chilling. So was Bohr’s moment of self doubt.

All the actors were excellent at portraying a fog of uncertainty shot through with sudden flashes of emotion, remembrance, love, grief, rage and what Bohr calls “the darkness of the human soul”.

Johnston-Barnes’s convincing Bohr came over initially as genuinely affectionate and avuncular towards his former pupil.

But among the good-natured banter are bursts of genuine anger: his mentee is now an important government figure in the country’s occupying force and a member of the nation who were persecuting him on racist grounds.

Equally convincing Fourie portrayed Heisenberg as stiffly, genuinely patriotic, genuinely proud of his position as a key government scientist and yet needy for his former mentor’s approbation.

Whitestone’s Margarethe excellently evoked both the subservience and the strength of her position as wife.

Her body language was tightly controlled while at the same time, she was revealed as a genuine intellectual support and foil for her husband. She also effectively voiced other possibilities.

Perhaps Heisenberg was trying to warn Bohr he was in danger from the forces of the Third Reich because of his Jewish background?

Copenhagen is not a popular play. But BMDS, Sheilagh Robertson and her cast and crew are to be congratulated on putting on this complex, thought-provoking and highly topical work.

• Copenhagen, a play by Michael Frayn, directed by Sheilagh Robertson, runs until Saturday, March 2, 2024 at the Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society’s Daylesford Theatre