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The team that brought us Copenhagen puts Willy Brandt and the end of the cold war on stage, Michaela Boland writes.
While all the world, it seems, is working itself into a lather over the hot new creative teams emerging in the fields of film, gaming, advertising or television, two venerable veterans of the English theatre world have been generating their own brand of excitement.
Since 1980, playwright Michael Frayn and director Michael Blakemore (an Australian for whom the local industry can take little credit because his considerable achievements were all won abroad) have been an impressive double act. They have collaborated on six, seven or possibly eight plays (they can't agree on exactly how many) and between them, they've notched up a hefty 148 years on this earth most spent working in theatre.
Their first collaboration, a straight comedy called Make or Break, was followed with the hit farce Noises Off which remains a popular revival. Of productions that followed, some failed to fly, others were more successful none more so than Copenhagen, Frayn's unlikely treatise on the mystery surrounding a 1941 meeting between two physicists working on developing the atom bomb for opposing sides during World War II.
Despite the apparently dry subject matter and Frayn's refusal to dumb down the issues in the pursuit of high drama, plus his propensity to tell rather than show, Copenhagen became a multi-award-winning international hit.
"Copenhagen was an audacious play," Blakemore says, "and it took a long while to arrive at that simplicity. We went through many versions and had many discussions."
Extended sell-out seasons in London and New York were replicated in Australia where the play broke box-office records for the Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf 2 theatre in 2002. It earned $1.1 million before transferring to the Melbourne Theatre Company. A return season in 2004, wherein Robert Menzies replaced the original star, Colin Friels, played strongly in Sydney, then at the Queensland Theatre Company.
That same year the Michaels' latest collaboration, Democracy, premiered at London's National Theatre to rave reviews, sell-out box office and a further swag of prizes. Billed not as a sequel but as a companion piece to Copenhagen, Democracy is a more ambitious play. It boasts an expensive set, a cast of 12 (Copenhagen had three) and will be staged by the STC at its Sydney Theatre, which is double the size of Wharf 2.
Democracy tackles the intriguing world of German politics during the 1970s when charismatic West German chancellor Willy Brandt's government was infiltrated by East German spies, eventually precipitating its downfall, but not before the chancellor set in train what Frayn believes was the demise of the Cold War.
Not everyone agrees with him and the issue was hotly debated following the premiere of the Berlin production, which Frayn wrote in German.
"They thought it reflected the truth [but] debated whether I have overstated the role of Willy Brandt in beginning to end the Cold War," Frayn told the Weekend AFR last week. "A lot of people have said it was the wealth of America and America's pressure on the Soviet Union which ended the Cold War.
"I'm not denying that, but some of the earliest steps were taken by Brandt. Until Russia accepted that Germany was not going to try to reverse the effects of the Second World War and reclaim its lost territories in the east there was no way Russia could begin to trust Germany and make this treaty. Willy Brandt persuaded his fellow Germans that they had to accept they had lost all that territory to the east, that Germany was divided into two countries.
"Many Germans didn't want to accept this because literally millions had lost their homes and been driven out of the territories in the east and had to move from East to West Germany. They felt very bitter about it and wanted their lives back."
In London Democracy struck a chord and played for a year, but in New York, where Germany's parliament is far from the public's consciousness, it has been a less spectacular success.
Blakemore, in Sydney to direct Democracy for the third time, is confident Australian audiences will embrace the play's intrigue; it is a spy story, after all.
"Whereas the British were more familiar with the German political system, which depends on coalitions, the Americans don't have coalitions," he says. "In Australia you do, so the politics of the play will be understood without effort."
Frayn has left this production to Blakemore, who says the set is identical to previous productions and the script has been tweaked only marginally.
Frayn gives a funny insight into the pair's collaborative rhythms.
"I write the play and send it to him," he says. "If he likes it, we sit down and he makes me read it aloud. It's a very painful process because I have no acting ability whatsoever and I can't even hit the right stress on my own lines.
"I have several goes at reading each line and he stops me and asks stupid questions, such as 'Why is he saying this?' and I get very impatient and irritated and say, 'Well, it's obvious why he says this'. And then I think about it and agree that it's not obvious, and I change it."
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