|
Here's a play about German politics every American will identify with
LONDON - British dramatist Michael Frayn's new play is about a head of government who has an uncanny ability to connect with the public - and who is brought down by political enemies and a weakness for women.
But it has nothing to do with Bill Clinton.
Democracy, which begins previews Wednesday at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, unfolds in West Germany in the early '70s, when Chancellor Willy Brandt was changing the political landscape by trying to open up a dialogue with the communist states behind the Iron Curtain.
The play focuses on how Brandt was betrayed by a trusted aide, Gunter Guillaume. A spy for the East German secret police, Guillaume compiled a list of the women with whom Brandt had flings.
It's not the first time Frayn has made drama out of an unlikely bit of history. His Copenhagen - winner of the Tony for Best Play in 2000 - concerned a 1941 meeting between two nuclear physicists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
The 71-year-old Frayn - a onetime reporter whose prolific literary output includes the farce Noises Off - says the play's success in London, where it originated at the National Theater, took him by surprise. "When I was working on it, people would say, 'What's your new play about?' and I said, 'It's about parliamentary democracy in West Germany,' and you could see their eyes glazing over."
But in his view, Germany's postwar history is as compelling as the Nazi period, the subject of so many books, plays and films.
"What fascinates me is how Germany recovered from Nazism," he says. "It's the most remarkable story."
He also wanted to show how Brandt's bold recognition of East Germany ultimately contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany 20 years later - an outcome he probably never foresaw.
PRAISED BY GERMANS
In Frayn's hands, the story of Brandt's betrayal and downfall makes for riveting drama, says Thomas Kielinger, London correspondent of the German newspaper Die Welt.
"It's amazing that an English author should show the Germans the way," Kielinger says. "It's all talking heads, yet he manages to pull it off like a Shakespearean history play."
Democracy is political theater but not docudrama - though that genre is thriving on the London stage with plays like Guantanamo, which recently transferred to Off-Broadway, and Stuff Happens, David Hare's account of America and Britain's decision to go to war in Iraq.
Hare's play is a montage that makes extensive use of the public record but also invents conversations that took place behind closed doors. Although Frayn does use passages from Brandt's actual speeches - condensed and reassembled - almost all the play comprises fictional dialogue.
Still, Frayn was delighted when two surviving members of Brandt's cabinet came to see it in Berlin and praised its accuracy. The wife of one of the men threw her arms around the lead actor, saying, "You even smell like Willy."
In writing Democracy, Frayn says, he was exploring not only political events but also the complexity of human behavior. Guillaume is both loyal and treacherous. Brandt, says Matthias Mattusek of Der Spiegel magazine, "was a dreamer. He was not reliable, he drank too much, he had affairs."
"My suggestion is that each of us is a kind of parliamentary democracy with many different conflicting interests that have to be resolved," says Frayn.
He drew his portrait of Brandt from research, never having met him. However, Frayn's wife, literary biographer and editor Claire Tomalin, once spoke to Brandt on the phone and found his charm "absolutely overwhelming," Frayn said. "But, of course, he did have rather a weakness for women journalists."
He and Tomalin - one of Britain's premier literary couples - moved out of inner London last year to a coach house near the River Thames with enough space for both to work at home and a back yard big enough for Tomal
in to indulge her passion for gardening. It's a very English home, where copies of the latest novels share coffee-table space with a video, "British Birds in Your Garden."
Before leaving for New York for the opening of Democracy, Frayn is holed up there, working on a screenplay of his last novel, Spies, which his daughter, Rebecca, is going to direct.
"We've done eight drafts so far, and we're still on speaking terms," he says.
