So you know someone or something as well as you know the back of your hand?
OK, shut your eyes and tell me all about your hand's veins, spots, wrinkles,
fluff and unevenly shaped nails. Even if you are Mr Memory, Voldermort or a
clever robot from the planet Zog, you can't. All right, look hard at your
hand and now anatomise it. That's still as daunting as taking an MA in
geology. Or, as Michael Frayn has remarked: “Nothing you can ever say will
wholly describe the thing that now lies before your eyes.”
That thought comes from Constructions, the series of philosophic reflections
that Frayn published in 1974, but it goes a long way towards defining the
overall theme of his plays. To see his masterpieces, Copenhagen and
Democracy, is to know that human motives, feelings, actions are elusive,
going on unreadable. Why did Heisenberg, discoverer of the uncertainty
principle, fail to give Hitler the A-bomb he demanded? What went through the
mind of Guillaume, the Stasi agent who spied on the man he loved, Willy
Brandt? Better try interpreting something less complex and contradictory,
such as the back of your hand.
Myself, I expect to leave Frayn's new play at the National, Afterlife,
thinking a dozen things at once. The subject this time is Max Reinhardt, the
pioneering theatre producer who also renovated the Baroque palace in
Salzberg where movers and shakers now meet to debate world affairs and,
bizarrely, much of The Sound of Music was shot. Afterlife itself doesn't
open until June 10, but Frayn has just published his intro to the play in a
collection of theatre essays called Stage Directions; and there he cites
descriptions galore of Reinhardt. He was convivial, withdrawn, bountiful,
hypersensitive, courageous, fearful, quarrelsome, kindly, indecisive, bold,
the Jew who refused Hitler's offer of rebirth as an Aryan - and, as all this
and more, a worthy Frayn protagonist.
So is Frayn to be categorised as a dauntingly cerebral dramatist? Well, he
shares Stoppard's intellectual curiosity, Alan Bennett's educated wit and
Simon Gray's fine sense of irony. But their work doesn't lack humanity and
fun, and nor does his. The point he makes openly in Constructions and
implicitly in many of his plays - that we're always vainly trying to explain
the inexplicable and categorise the uncategorisable - applies to Frayn too.
He's Stephen Hawking and Feydeau, Bertrand Russell and Brian Rix in
falling-trouser mode: the serious maestro who wrote our era's funniest farce
in Noises Off.
Let's not forget that Frayn, now 74, came to fame as a humorist. When he was
at Cambridge in the 1950s he wrote a column in the undergraduate newspaper
about an archetypally dull undergraduate called John Plod, a parody that got
him thrown into the college pond by a marauding band of aggrieved
historians, and when he moved to The Guardian he spoofed sleazy ad men,
trendy couples, slick politicians, the whole 1960s caboodle. But he wearied
of what he saw as the “jeering and bullying” of the satire industry, and
turned to in-depth reportage, novels and finally plays: among which,
however, were the hilarious pair that have recently had successful reruns in
the West End, Donkeys' Years and Noises Off itself.
Donkeys' Years involves eminent graduates who revert to student silliness at a
boozy Cambridge reunion, Noises Off a rep company whose performers just
can't sustain the awesomely precise disciplines of the farce they're
touring. When I first saw that particular piece, I had a bad infection and
desperately tried to stop laughing because it left my chest in agony as I
sprayed germs round the theatre; and I just couldn't. But nor could I miss
the play's sly symbolism.
“Getting on, getting off, getting the sardines on and off,” cries the
distraught director as a key prop again goes missing, “That's farce, that's
the theatre - that's life.”
That's life indeed. Again and again Frayn's characters try and fail to order
the innately disorderly. In 1975 he set Alphabetical Order in a chaotic
newspaper library which is reorganised by an ultra-efficient young woman,
only for this cold-eyed custodian of the time-capsules to see her work
destroyed as the hacks erupt in dionysian anarchy. In the clutch of short
plays that he called Alarms and Excursions, the gadgets meant to simplify
our lives - from baby alarms to oven-timers, burglar alarms to high-tech
bottle-openers - cause anxiety, consternation and, in the case of a
punctilious foreign visitor earnestly following the serial instructions that
his hosts place on their answering machine, damage and near death.
But the philosophic implications often go farther. When he was growing up in
suburban Ewell, Frayn watched V1 rockets fly and cut out overhead, once
blowing in the roof of his house and putting him and his parents in danger,
yet always seeming to him “a wonderful entertainment invented for children
by the Germans”. As he himself has joked, that's an example of the confusion
of the objective and subjective that was also to become one of his
preoccupations. We see what we hope to see, need to see, imagine we see, or
want others to see. Take those clouds with which Hamlet tried to disorient
poor, bewildered old Polonius. They were Rorschach blots in flux, twisting
and billowing from camels to weasels to whales in one mind-bending moment.
That's the very image that gave one of Frayn's finest plays its title. In
Clouds he drew on his own experience of going on an official tour to
Castro's Cuba to show a group of journalists imposing their own
interpretations on the country and each other. Cane fields and collective
farms become more or less boring depending on the characters' politics,
moods, shifting relationships and, especially, the sexual switches of a
wayward writer performed in 1978 by Felicity Kendal. One moment the
professional hack played by Tom Courtenay was patronising her as an amateur
and hating everything, the next visiting her bed and loving even the
fertiliser plants.
If there are always suggestive overtones or undertows in Frayn's plays - and
let's also remember that in 2006 he published The Human Touch, a 500-page
attempt to find meaning in an incomprehensible universe - there's also
plenty of lively characterisation and human variety. In 1980 his Make and
Break, set at a trade fair in Frankfurt, cast Leonard Rossiter as the
monomaniacal, workaholic director of a company making walls and doors. In
Democracy Roger Allam gave a wonderfully subtle performance as the
inscrutable Willy Brandt. Matthew Marsh sent you out of Copenhagen not
knowing if Heisenberg was a Nazi opportunist or a secret subversive or, as
the cynical wife of his fellow physicist Bohr suggested, the human
counterpart of his flying particles, “here, there, everywhere and nowhere”.
Frayn's National Service consisted of a two-year Russian course, just in case
the military had to parachute him into Red Square disguised in a fur hat.
But his fluency in the language came to better use.
His translations of Chekhov's plays are now standard scripts, and his love of
the dramatist himself is unbounded. Especially, he admires Chekhov's ability
“to see people coolly and objectively from the outside while being able to
be effortlessly inside them”. And that's a gift that Frayn shares. Always he
follows his friend Peter Nichols's advice, which is to read his scripts from
the stance of each character in turn, to ensure each point of view is well
represented.
Always he strives to avoid obvious or glib judgments. That hasn't pleased
everyone. He's not “topical” or “committed” enough for some critics. For
instance, he should have used Make and Break to attack “business”: an idea
that Frayn, whose father was a salesman for an asbestos company, thinks
absurd. Again, his work is said to lack toughness, hardness, darkness.
Well, a good answer to both objections would be his 1984 play Benefactors,
which involves an architect, David, forced by planning restrictions to
transform municipal housing blocks into skyscrapers. In this he's publicly
opposed by Colin, the old chum who feels belittled by his success and
patronised by his unerring kindness and generosity.
The emotions get extraordinarily intense. Colin's much-misused wife ends up
throwing a pan of steaming water in his face, having justifiably described
him as a hater, a destroyer and “evil”. And yet you can still sympathise
with the frustration within the troubled loser, still realise that for Colin
to resist high-rise concrete may be a case of bad motives being put to good
use. Indeed, Benefactors is a play I'd like to see again, along with
Alphabetical Order, Clouds and the even earlier Sandboy, a wry portrait of a
maddeningly successful, relentlessly cheerful champagne socialist who
deflects criticism by apologetically saying things such as “Yes, I have a
smugness problem,” and “Don't think I get any pleasure out of being happy”.
Well, Frayn's own career hasn't been unerringly happy. In 1993 Here, about
young marrieds adjusting to their new lives and newer bedsit, struck critics
as clever-clever. His 1990 follow-up to Noises Off, Look Look, was a flop.
And he described Balmoral, a 1987 satire in which it's Britain and not
Russia that has gone Bolshevik, as “a Titanic searching for its iceberg”.
Yet even that had its moments, as when a visiting Tsarist, told that nobody
is taken outside and shot, replies: “You mean they don't even trouble to
take them outside any more”? With Frayn, you can't have laughter without
ideas - and you can't have ideas without laughter.
Afterlife previews at the Lyttelton, SE1 (020-7453 3000), from June 3 and
opens on June 10
MICHAEL FRAYN: THE WORK OF A LIFETIME
1933 Born September 8 in Mill Hill, North London
1952-54 National Service with the Royal Artillery and Intelligence
Corps. Is sent up to Cambridge to learn Russian (along with Alan Bennett)
1954-57 Studies philosophy at Cambridge. Writes for Footlights and
Varsity
1957-62 Reporter and columnist for the Manchester Guardian
1960 Marries Gillian Palmer. The couple have three daughters before
divorcing in 1989
1962-68 Writer and columnist for The Observer
1965 His first novel, The Tin Men
1971 The Two of Us, his first professional play, opens in London
1975 Alphabetical Order
1976 Donkeys' Years and Clouds
1978 Adapts The Cherry Orchard
1982 Noises Off debuts at the Lyric, Hammersmith. It then runs in the
West End for four years
1984 Benefactors
1986 Writes the screenplay for the John Cleese film Clockwise
1990 Look Look opens in the West End, with Stephen Fry. It lasts a
month. “A total catastrophe... a dud play,” Frayn said
1993 Marries Claire Tomalin
1998 Copenhagen
2003 Democracy
Nightingale's article beautifully, and accurately, summarizes Frayn's masterly fusion of philosophy with his plays. My own research could not have put it better, except to add that the same fusion can be seen in his novels.
Peter Young, Pensacola, USA/Florida