'COPENHAGEN' AN INVITING PRIME-TIME DESTINATION.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

THOUGH ``COPENHAGEN'' deals relentlessly in big ideas - chance, the atomic bomb and the outcome of World War II - it's essentially a play that uses physics as a metaphor for one's soul. It focuses on what may have transpired during a mysterious 1941 meeting between two estranged physicists representing opposing sides of the conflict in World War II.

Niels Bohr (Stephen Rea), a Danish Jew, won a Nobel Prize for his discovery that quantum physics applies to all matter, not just energy, and indeed, the conundrums he faces in Michael Frayn's Tony Award-winning drama have direct consequences affecting not just the theoretical masses around the globe, but himself, his family and friends, as well. German Werner Heisenberg (Daniel Craig) picked up his Nobel for creating the uncertainty principle, which states that no particle or element can be fully understood, because simply observing it changes it.

``The trouble is,'' Bohr tells Heisenberg, referring to his work with Nazi scientists attempting to create an atomic reactor, ``knowing what's happened to you.'' Bohr refers to the physics of Heisenberg's soul.

The uncertainty principle looms large here, because no one knows why Heisenberg wanted to meet with Bohr at that point - after being close collaborators, they hadn't spoken in years - or what was discussed at the meeting. Certainly, it had to do with The Bomb - Heisenberg was leading Nazi scientists to develop it, while eventually Bohr contributed to the American effort.

Frayn's fiction makes for a compelling informed guess. Did Heisenberg seek information about the Americans? Hope to weasel potentially deadly advice from his mentor? Wish to propose a multilateral nuclear truce? Or just reflect on old times before it was too late? Francesca Annis plays Bohr's wife, who occasionally finds herself playing referee.

Director/adapter Howard Davies opens up the play with melancholy strolls through the streets of Copenhagen, where the momentous encounter took place, and time-shifting in the rooms of an elegant mansion, alternately ornately appointed (during the 1941 meeting) or in abandoned squalor (as ghosts linger to debate the reasons for and meanings of the meeting).

Davies brings the piece an elegant melancholy with a touch of portentousness - at times, there's a certain monotony to the line recitations, recalling the overly arch did-this-happen-or-did-this? tropes of the French New Wave film ``Last Year at Marienbad.'' Overall, though, it's a wonderful mystery within a character study within a painless physics-for-dummies lesson.

COPENHAGEN - Three and one half stars

What: ``PBS Hollywood Presents'' production of Michael Frayn's Tony Award-winning drama of a mysterious wartime meeting between physicists on opposite sides of the conflict.

Where: KCET.

When: 9 tonight.

In a nutshell: Elegiac speculative fiction on a mysterious meeting that might have been among the most pivotal of the 20th century.