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Complex human arrangements are at the heart of democracy, says director Michael Blakemore.
Michael Blakemore seems relieved to be directing Democracy in Australia after staging it in New York – and not just because American critics were less impressed than their London counterparts by the play's cool ambiguities.
First, there's the temperament of Australian actors. "There is a directness of expression," he says brightly. "I like the way Australian actors look for a kind of blunt truth. They cut to the chase."
Then there's the interest Australians have in foreign countries: he expects we will know more about the history of post-war Germany, the substance of the play, than Americans do. "There is not that rather exasperating self-sufficiency," he says, a roll of the eyes implicit in his voice. And, finally, Australians understand the exigencies of coalition politics, having followed the shifting alliances of our parties at state and federal levels. "The political description of West Germany will be immediately understood by an Australian audience," he says.
Blakemore, Australian-born but long resident in London, has returned to his home town for the second time in three years to mount a play by his friend Michael Frayn, for the Sydney Theatre Company. In 2002, it was Copenhagen, the absorbing account of the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, fathers of the atomic bomb.
Democracy, a kind of companion piece in terms of style and serious purpose, opens at the Sydney Theatre on Thursday. In it, Frayn explores the relationship between Willy Brandt and his personal assistant Gunter Guillaume, whose exposure as an East German spy forced Brandt's resignation in 1974. It is not so much political theatre in the sense of agitprop, Blakemore explains, as it is a meditation on politics.
Blakemore and Frayn have collaborated for more than 20 years. Their friendship is touchingly palpable in Blakemore's conversation. Frayn has said that, after his wife, the biographer Claire Tomalin, Blakemore is always the first to read his work.
"There has to be a hierarchy, and that has to begin with words on the page," Blakemore says. "It's very hard to write a really good play and the director has got to honour that. And before the director starts fooling around, or making suggestions, he's got to completely understand it. Michael knows that if he is adamant about something, I am not going to defy him. But at the same time he's very open-minded."
Frayn brings a wide-ranging intelligence to his work. He studied philosophy at Cambridge, is fluent in several languages, and his translations of Chekhov are widely admired. As a foreign correspondent for The Guardian in Germany in the 1960s and '70s, he developed an abiding admiration for the way that country reinvented itself after World War II. In a 37-page postscript to the play, he writes: "The Federal Republic began life as a graveyard in which almost every city had been reduced to rubble, and almost every institution and political resource contaminated by complicity in the crimes of National Socialism; yet from this utter desolation its citizens constructed one of the most prosperous, stable and decent states in Europe." He was fascinated, he writes, by the complexity of West Germany's federal structure and its dependence on political coalitions, compounded by the existence of a "second, shadow Germany on the other side of the wall".
In choosing the relationship between Brandt and Guillaume as his focus, Blakemore says, Frayn set out to explore an additional theme: "In a democracy, a charismatic leader of real vision, if he gets in with sufficient popular support, has to force his vision through with only a very limited window of opportunity – the time it takes for the electorate to get fed up with him and for his colleagues to turn against him."
One can appreciate the significance of the moment, Blakemore adds, even when it involves politicians one can't admire. "[George W.] Bush, after 9/11, had that window of opportunity to go to war, to rewrite civil rights, to do almost anything," he points out. "He couldn't do it now because that window of opportunity is over." Brandt, the socialist chancellor from 1969 to 1974, was a national hero in West Germany. He chose exile in Scandinavia when Hitler came to power and worked in the resistance. He emerged in post-war Germany as one of the few public figures with genuinely clean hands. And his idealism didn't falter once he gained power. A notorious womaniser, which colleagues feared would invite blackmail, he was also the architect of Ostpolitik, the policy of rapprochement with East Germany which his successor, Helmut Schmidt, continued and which some historians believe was the real groundwork for the fall of the Soviet empire, long before Ronald Reagan's hardline diplomacy and wielding of economic and military power forced the denouement.
Brandt's undoing – the flashpoint in the slow burn of political scheming within his own party – was the unmasking of Guillaume. The apparatchik had joined the German Social Democratic Party in Frankfurt soon after leaving the east with his wife, Christel, the original star plant of East German intelligence. In a series of small, serendipitous steps, he ended up working, with intimate access, in Brandt's political office.
Like Brandt's, Guillaume's character is morally elusive. He seems to have genuinely admired Brandt and wanted him to succeed, even while he spied on him. On stage, he stands between the historical figures of the West German cabinet and his fictional Stasi spymaster, in constant dialogue with both sides.
The play, Frayn told the writer Neal Ascherson just before its London premiere in 2003, is about "the complexity of human arrangements" and how people can recognise the multiple personalities within themselves and still go on working for several quite contradictory ends.
Frayn's view of democracy is not idealistic. "If you were looking for an explanatory companion text, it would be Churchill's dictum that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others," Blakemore says. Indeed, Frayn has Guillaume's spymaster describe West Germany as: "Three political parties, in and out of bed with each other like drunken intellectuals. Fifteen warring cabinet ministers in Bonn alone, and 60 million separate egos. All making deals with each other and breaking them. All trying to guess which way everyone else will jump. All out for themselves, and all totally dependent on everyone else."
The text is written in the almost cinematic style that Frayn has developed since moving on from his early comedies, the simple entertainments that culminated in Noises Off – the "best farce ever written", Blakemore states unequivocally.
"Often a scene will begin, like in a film cut, in the middle of the scene, as it were, and it will leave that scene the minute its usefulness in the play is exhausted," the director explains. "So you get this great series of tiny moments, often without any scene change, and it leads to extraordinarily concentrated storytelling.
"I once described Michael as a man of passion and moderation, because he is never tidy in his dramatic writing," Blakemore says. "He never gives you what perhaps you think you want – that the villain will be punished and the hero elevated. He gives you something which is far more like truth."
