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A two-hour talkfest about German politics should spell box-office disaster. But not in the hands of playwright Michael Frayn, writes Jo Litson.
Ten middle-aged men in grey suits talking for two hours about German coalition politics: it doesn't exactly sound like the most riveting of dramas, does it? In fact, Michael Frayn's latest play, Democracy, is precisely that: a gripping, wry, moving account of Willy Brandt's years as German Chancellor (1969-1974), his "Ostpolitik" (Eastern policy) of reconciliation with East Germany and the Soviet Union, its part in the thawing of the Cold War and, ultimately, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the intriguing tale of the spy who loved him but brought him undone.
Just as Frayn managed to make quantum physics seem perfectly understandable in his award-winning 1998 play Copenhagen, so the complex politics spring vividly to life in Democracy. Frayn's genius in both plays is to use science and politics, respectively, as potent metaphors for the human condition, while the personal stories they tell reverberate universally.
The enormous success of Copenhagen surprised many - but none more than the playwright himself. Frayn wrote it because he was deeply fascinated by the subject matter: the mysterious 1941 meeting in Nazi-occupied Denmark between Werner Heisenberg, head of the Third Reich nuclear program, and his friend and mentor, Danish physicist Niels Bohr. However, given that the play is all talk and intellectual philosophising, Frayn admits he didn't expect it to find a producer or an audience. Some told him it was a radio play but director Michael Blakemore, Frayn's long-time collaborator, was convinced it would work on stage. And so it proved.
Without the success of Copenhagen, one wonders whether he would ever have considered writing something as audaciously ambitious as Democracy. "Perhaps not," says Frayn. "But I had exactly the same thoughts about Democracy when I was writing it. It's about parliamentary German democracy, which could be an extremely boring subject, and I certainly thought that it would be very unlikely to find a producer and didn't know if people would come to see it."
Once again they did. Following in Copenhagen's footsteps, Democracy sold out at London's National Theatre, where it premiered in 2003, transferred to the West End and then opened last November on Broadway, where it is still playing. It also had a successful Berlin season last year. A Sydney Theatre Company production opens at the Sydney Theatre on April 15 with Blakemore directing (as he did in London and New York). The STC will be hoping that Democracy repeats the box-office magic of Copenhagen, which broke records at the Wharf in 2002, selling more than $1.1m worth of tickets before going to the Melbourne Theatre Company later that year and then returning in 2004 for seasons in Sydney and Brisbane.
Democracy focuses on the relationship between the charismatic Brandt and Günter Guillaume, a rather dull, servile chap who joined Brandt's staff as a junior aide within weeks of his election and who was eventually promoted to his personal assistant despite the fact that Brandt disliked him and asked several times for his transfer. Guillaume had left East Berlin 13 years earlier and, although he was devoted to Brandt and worked tirelessly for him, he was also spying on him for the Stasi with equal fervour. Using this compelling personal story to mirror the political, Frayn explores the possibilities, complexities, divisions and contradictions that exist not just within governments and nations, but within individuals.
For years, Frayn did his writing in a small flat in north London just around the corner from home but last year he and his wife, biographer Claire Tomalin, moved to a large house in Richmond, which backs onto meadows leading down to the river, where there is room for both of them to have an office.
Now a spry 71-year-old, the tall, lanky playwright may have a fierce intellect but is charming and friendly in an easy, unforced way, offering a pot of tea and cake when I arrive, then chivalrously guiding me to the shortcut through the meadows back to Richmond station when I leave.
Frayn is one of Britain's most successful and prolific playwrights. Democracy is his 16th stage play, the best known and most performed of which is Noises Off, his ingenious theatrical farce. (State Theatre Company of South Australia will stage a production in October-November.) Unusually, he is an equally successful novelist. Headlong, about an art historian on the trail of a lost Brueghel, was short-listed for the 1999 Booker Prize. His most recent novel, Spies, about a young boy drawn into an adult world he doesn't understand when his best friend announces his mother is a German spy, won the 2003 Whitbread Fiction Award but was pipped for the main prize by Tomalin's biography of Samuel Pepys.
Frayn's fascination with Germany goes back to 1972 when, still a journalist, he visited Berlin to write articles about the East and West sides of the city for The Observer.
"I arrived not knowing quite what to expect and trying not to let my prejudices stand in the way and was completely bowled over," says Frayn. "It's a fascinating city. The first thing is it was so badly damaged during the war that it challenges the imagination. Design-wise, it was a place that didn't make sense. At that time, the Wall still divided the city and West Berlin was completely surrounded by East Germany. Plus it was no longer an effective capital - federal politics happened in Bonn - so it was a place that was inexplicable and always when you see something inexplicable, you immediately want to say, 'What is this?' so I suppose that's what first got me interested. But I just discovered I liked being in Germany very much. I made a lot of friends there and I think Berlin remains my favourite city."
The thing that completely captured his imagination was Germany's extraordinary post-war recovery. "Almost every German city was destroyed during the war and every institution corrupted by the Nazis," says Frayn. "The idea that after this total desolation they could create this stable democracy, when they had very little democratic tradition to go back to, and a very decent society, which has survived ever since, is an incredible achievement and every time I go back to Germany, I am amazed again by it. All nations experience difficulties and all individuals have disasters in their lives and to see this colossal example of recovery is absolutely inspiring."
In 1972, Brandt was in the middle of masterminding West Germany's reconciliation with the East and Frayn followed the story of his political demise two years later with interest. But quite what triggered him to write a play about it 30 years later, he can't recall.
"I remember thinking I wanted to write something about post-war Germany and its recovery," he says. "I also wanted to write something about the complexity of the political process in general and Germany was such an extreme example. I also wanted to write about the complexity of the different possibilities and sides within ourselves and both Brandt and Guillaume were good examples of that. Guillaume was a great supporter of Brandt's, had great respect for him, possibly even loved him, and at the same time he devoted his life to spying on him. And although I think Brandt was a great man, he had terrible weaknesses. He was a drinker and a womaniser, as a lot of politicians are, but he was also a depressive and found it difficult to take decisions."
In a postscript to Methuen's published text of Democracy, Frayn says it was "the sheer complexity of the mixture" that finally convinced him to write the play. "Complexity is what the play is about: the complexity of human arrangements and of human beings themselves, and the difficulties that this creates in shaping and understanding our actions."
With Democracy powering onto the world's stages, Frayn has been hard at work on a screenplay of Spies, to be directed by his eldest daughter Rebecca. When we spoke, he had eight drafts under his belt. "I haven't had all that much success with film," he admits. "I've written quite a few films but the only one that had any success was Clockwise which John Cleese did. But I'm really keen to get this one right because it's for my daughter."
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