Frayn’s play - which dramatizes a famous meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen - certainly opened the floodgates for plays about science, and set exacting new standards in the process. But just as classical physics preceded quantum mechanics, there were plays about science and scientists before Copenhagen was first performed in 1998. Bertolt Brecht completed Life of Galileo in 1956 - having started work on the so-called Copenhagen version of the play in the late 1930s - and The Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt was first performed in 1962.
In the November issue of Physics World, Peter Rodgers reviews the history of physics as drama