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Director Michael Blakemore has guided all playwright Michael Frayn's hits from page to stage. As their latest collaboration transfers to the West End, they tell Dominic Cavendish why their friendship has thrived over 35 years - despite one's attempt to drown the other
What a curious coincidence it looks in retrospect. In 1969, Willy Brandt was elected Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was also the year that Michael Frayn, then best known as a journalist and novelist, first met the theatre director Michael Blakemore.
Frayn went to see the Blakemore's production of Peter Nichols's The National Health at the Old Vic, was greatly impressed and offered congratulations during the interval.
Little could the two men have thought at the time that 35 years later they would be jointly basking in acclaim for a compelling drama about Brandt's troubled tenure in office, or that the play would, in transferring from the National Theatre to the West End, mark yet another high point in one of the most enduring and fruitful working partnerships in British theatre.
Democracy is the eighth project that has brought them together, though the various transfers and recastings of productions down the years takes the number of collaborations far higher.
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