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Dense and austere, enthralling and sober, historic and contemporary - contradictions, double meanings and oppositional forces permeate the intricate workings of Michael Frayn's Democracy.
The fictional play, based on archival material, centres on the intriguing relationship between the heroic and indecisive Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor from 1969 to 1974, and the nondescript Stasi agent, Günter Guillaume, his peculiarly like-minded assistant, confessor and eventual destroyer.
On Peter J. Davison's two-tiered, compartmentalised set pierced by a spiral staircase, Democracy conveys the tainted inner workings of a bunkered political machine and the smooth rhetoric and assurances that appeal to public emotions despite their hollow ring.
Frayn cleverly stitches together a drama that is partly a Cold War spy thriller, a history play and, moreover, a human drama about duplicity, trust, betrayal and love. It takes a while for the play to gain momentum and become greater than the sum of its men-in-suit parts - ministers and advisers who habitually huddle and drift into uncertain night. Elusiveness, paradox and enigma are a constant of Frayn's writing.
Democracy is a fine, intelligent and searching work, though it is not, to my mind, as brilliant as Frayn's Copenhagen.
"Complexity is what the play is about: the complexity of human arrangements and of human beings themselves, and the difficulties that this creates in both shaping and understanding our actions," Frayn says in a program note. The play, and Michael Blakemore's assured production, gains power as it increasingly reveals the demons of the womanising Brandt (Philip Quast) - his isolation, self-doubt and depression - and deftly depicts Guillaume's (Geoff Kelso) conflict between his duty to Brandt's enemies and his affection for their prey. Both men are fascinated by the details and difficulties of democracy, and the second act presents some nicely ironic moments of suspicion between them that are both amusing and strangely sad.
Quast's performance is complicated and commanding. He brings out Brandt's idealism and contradictions without resorting to bravado while capably exposing the melancholy, uncertainty and failings that topple him. That Quast makes him both likeable and unknowable is quite a feat. "The merest possibility that Guillaume's not what he seems makes him infinitely more tolerable," Brandt says in one of a number of wittily ironic and elegant lines.
Kelso is superb as the equally inscrutable Guillaume, whose reports to his East German cohorts are credited in Democracy with having led the way to east-west reconciliation.
The ensemble is excellent in often dry and insubstantial parts, and includes Brandon Burke, Paul Goddard, Sean Taylor and John Gaden, who makes a memorable mark as the gentlemanly conniver Herbert Wehner.
Blakemore doesn't push for topical resonances but they are there for the taking. The devious backstabbing and convenient lies, the cracks and fissures behind the partitions of smooth, unruffled command - surely they have a familiar ring?
© The Sydney Morning Herald.
