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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Michael Frayn is a decent man. He is nice to everybody, easily pleased, self-effacing, and well liked. He is optimistic, cheerful, tidy, hardworking, discreet, modest, logically scrupulous, and parsimonious in matters of sentiment. He is moderate in most things (one would be tempted to say in all things were that not an immoderately moderate position). For instance, he enjoys food and wine but thinks that excessive gastronomic zeal is silly. "It's nicer to have good wine than nasty wine, it's nicer to have good food than nasty food, but everyone gets carried away by their enthusiasms," he says. He appreciates the flexible pragmatism of Tony Blair, of whom he may be the last remaining British admirer.
Frayn's is not a promising profile for a writer of fiction, but he has managed to embrace the impediment of sanity to write a series of plays and novels--more plays than novels, the former seeming to come more naturally to him--in which emotion and abstraction are planted in domestic soil. From Frayn's perspective, much fiction tends to look a little over-the-top. He believes, for instance, that mid-century existentialists such as Beckett, with their explorations of extreme blankness, have unintentionally produced a kind of feel-good literature. "You think, Well, I'm a bit bored sometimes, but at least I'm not as bored as that," he says. Once, on a visit to Japan, Frayn went to see a Kabuki play and found it an extremely foreign spectacle, very melodramatic and violent. At the end, he remarked to the friend who had taken him that it was a pity it was summer, since everyone in the audience seemed to have hay fever, judging by the constant sniffling. They didn't have hay fever, the friend explained. They were crying.
In one of his novels, "A Landing on the Sun" (1991), Frayn refers to "the little back garden that serves as a soul for the English." In most contexts, this would be an insult, but for Frayn the implication is more subtle. Yes, he is mocking the confines of Englishness, but at the same time there is an affection and a respect for that modesty of claim on the world's space; for the sense of sanity and limits; and for the inclination to self-denigrate that led him to formulate such a sentence in the first place. "He's a man of common sense," Neal Ascherson, the Scottish writer and an old friend of Frayn's, says. "He dislikes mysticism. He's non-romantic." In a book of philosophy that Frayn wrote, entitled "Constructions," he quotes a line from Heraclitus that a girl quoted to him when he was in university, and which he claims not to understand but has nonetheless remembered ever since as being singularly pleasing: "A dry soul is best."
Frayn has been to Russia many times, and has spent a considerable portion of his working life translating Chekhov; he finds the characters and sense of humor familiar, because they are so similar to those of the English middle class. Indeed, he feels that the English may understand them better than do the Russians, who misinterpret Chekhov's self-deprecating little ironies as solemn statements about life. But Frayn has never felt at home in Russia, and never wanted to. "It's always been too much for me," he says. "Russians are maximalists. I have a moderate view of life. Russian friendship has always been a very demanding concept, particularly in Soviet times. If you were admitted to someone's circle as a friend, you were expected to give up anything, really, as the Russians did for each other. If you had some money and your friend wanted to borrow it, you gave it to him. You had to be prepared to devote whole days to seeing people. Well, there are some English people who can cope with that, some who like it, but I can't say I ever have. I take a view of friendship as something that doesn't make those kinds of demands on you."
The ambivalence of friendship comes up often in Frayn's work. In "Benefactors," a tight, sharp play that opened in 1984 (one of the first of his works in which comedy takes second place to emotional plotting), two couples become excessively entangled in each other's lives and disaster follows. Frayn has written several excellent farces, among them his most brilliant work, "Noises Off," and one of the reasons they are so good is his ability to intensify to nearly unbearable levels the claustrophobia of the genre--the anxiety felt by both the characters and the audience at the inescapable proximity of other people, the way that characters are always bumping into each other in the wrong place and at the time when they need most desperately to flee. "Noises Off" is actually a farce within a farce, and the amazing structure of the thing, crafted with extraordinary care and precision, is apparent as the action descends further and further into chaos and hysteria. In the introduction to his second collection of plays, Frayn wrote, of farces, "You refuse to let yourself identify with the characters, or feel their feelings. You reject absolutely the idea that it could be you up there, so idiotically embarrassed, so transparently mendacious. . . . This is what gives farce its hysterical edge. Your refusal to recognise yourself has an element of violence in it. . . . Farce is a brutally difficult form. It is also of course a despised one. In laughing at it you have lost your moral dignity, and you don't like to admit it afterwards."
Frayn's newest play, "Democracy," follows the rise of Gunter Guillaume, an East German Stasi spy who attained the post of aide to Willy Brandt while Brandt was Chancellor of West Germany, in the late sixties and early seventies. Frayn's Guillaume is genuinely devoted to Brandt, even though he betrays him every day. Some of Frayn's friends found it surprising that, when he had been so long preoccupied by the peculiar cliches of the English middle class, he began, late in life, to write about foreigners, but Frayn doesn't feel that Germans are really foreign. "I get to Germany and I feel a dreamlike sense of being at home," he says. "Germans keep their distance and use correct social forms in English ways." It is for this reason that Frayn's interest in twentieth-century German politics is not the common one. "The only part of German history that seems to arouse much interest in the British is the Nazi period," he wrote in a postscript to "Democracy." "That brutal holiday from the moral restraints under which West European societies normally labour possesses a kind of corrupt glamour for even the most timid and law-abiding. The half-century that has followed Germany's awakening from the sick dream is thought to be a time of dull respectability....
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