Michael Frayn

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Michael Frayn, FRSL (/freɪn/; born 8 September 1933) is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off^[8] and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy. His novels, such as Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong and Spies, have also been critical and commercial successes, making him one of the handful of writers in the English language to succeed in both drama and prose fiction. He has also written philosophical works, such as The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe (2006).

Early life[]

Frayn was born at Mill Hill (then in Middlesex) to Thomas Allen Frayn, a deaf asbestos salesman from a working-class family of blacksmiths, locksmiths and servants, in which deafness was hereditary, and his wife Violet Alice (née Lawson). Violet was the daughter of a failed palliasse merchant; having studied as a violinist at the Royal Academy of Music, she worked as a shop assistant and occasional clothes model at Harrods. Frayn's sister would also later work at Harrods, as a children's hairdresser.^[9][10] He grew up in Ewell, Surrey, and was educated at Kingston Grammar School. Following two years of National Service, during which he learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, Frayn read Moral Sciences (Philosophy) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating in 1957. He then worked as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian and The Observer, where he established a reputation as a satirist and comic writer, and began publishing his plays and novels.

Works[]

The play Copenhagen deals with a historical event, a 1941 meeting between the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his protégé, the German Werner Heisenberg, when Denmark is under German occupation, and Heisenberg is—maybe?—working on the development of an atomic bomb. Frayn was attracted to the topic because it seemed to 'encapsulate something about the difficulty of knowing why people do what they do and there is a parallel between that and the impossibility that Heisenberg established in physics, about ever knowing everything about the behaviour of physical objects'.^[11] The play explores various possibilities.

Frayn's more recent play Democracy ran successfully in London (the National Theatre, 2003-4 and West End transfer), Copenhagen and on Broadway (Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 2004-5); it dramatised the story of the German chancellor Willy Brandt and his personal assistant, the East German spy Günter Guillaume. Five years later, again at the National Theatre, it was followed by Afterlife, a biographical drama of the life of the great Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt, director of the Salzburg Festival, which opened at the Lyttelton Theatre in June 2008, starring Roger Allam as Reinhardt.^[12]

His other original plays include two evenings of short plays, The Two of Us and Alarms and Excursions, the philosophical comedies Alphabetical Order, Benefactors, Clouds, Make and Break and Here, and the farces Donkeys' Years, Balmoral (also known as Liberty Hall), and Noises Off, which critic Frank Rich in his book The Hot Seat claimed "is, was, and probably always will be the funniest play written in my lifetime."

His novels include Headlong (shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize), The Tin Men (won the 1966 Somerset Maugham Award), The Russian Interpreter (1967, Hawthornden Prize) Towards the End of the Morning, Sweet Dreams, A Landing on the Sun, A Very Private Life, Now You Know and Skios (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2012). His novel, Spies, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction in 2002. He has also written a book about philosophy, Constructions, and a book of his own philosophy, The Human Touch.

His columns for The Guardian and The Observer (collected in The Day of the Dog, The Book of Fub and On the Outskirts) are models of the comic essay; in the 1980s a number of them were adapted and performed for BBC Radio 4 by Martin Jarvis.

He has also written screenplays for the films Clockwise, starring John Cleese, First and Last starring Tom Wilkinson, Birthday, Jamie on a Flying Visit, and the TV series Making Faces, starring Eleanor Bron.^[13]

He is now considered to be Britain's finest translator of Anton Chekhov^[14] (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard) as well as an early untitled work, which he titled Wild Honey (other translations of the work have called it Platonov or Don Juan in the Russian Manner) and a number of Chekhov's smaller plays for an evening called The Sneeze (originally performed on the West End by Rowan Atkinson).

He also translated Yuri Trifonov's play Exchange, Leo Tolstoy's The Fruits of Enlightenment, and Jean Anouilh's Number One.

In 1980, he presented the Australian journey of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys of the World. His journey took him from Sydney to Perth on the Indian Pacific with side visits to the Lithgow Zig Zag and a journey on The Ghan's old route from Marree to Alice Springs shortly before the opening of the new line from Tarcoola to Alice Springs.

Frayn's wife, Claire Tomalin, is a biographer and literary journalist.^[15]

Frayn and Samuel Beckett[]

Among the ashes of the Beckettian paralysis of modern man and the Brechtian call for political activism through plying the ‘alienation effect,’ a Fraynian phoenix emerged, which had absorbed both of them. Frayn’s works reflected the indeterminacy yet did not find it repulsive or dark. Frayn does not regard uncertainty as a tragic element in modern man’s life but finds an opportunity to make entertaining comedy out of the fact. While Beckett’s uncertainty produces plays full of anxiety, Frayn convinces the audience that this is a typical situation in life that can be regarded through its comic effect. Frayn regards the text of a play as only one of the elements in its production and insists on receiving the notion of theatre as an alloy made of many particles. He embraces the uncertainty of life and applies it to performing a play. His brilliance shows face in standing against advocates of nihilism who portray the new world as a dark, gloomy flux of uncertain data. Beckett’s characters are not responsible for anything; they are stuck in a situation and paralyzed while Frayn gives them choices and lets them mobility throughout the play. His work is philosophical yet in a grotesque combination with comedy, its final product entertains the audience rather than pushing them into the uncomfortable sense of indeterminacy.^[16]

Awards[]

• 1966: Somerset Maugham Award for The Tin Men
• 1975: London Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy, for Alphabetical Order
• 1976: Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy, for Donkeys' Years*
• 1980: London Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy for Make and Break
• 1982: London Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy, for Noises Off
• 1982: Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy, for Noises Off
• 1984: London Evening Standard Award for Best Play, for Benefactors
• 1986: New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play of the 1985-86 Season for Benefactors
• 1990: International Emmy Award for First and Last
• 1991: Sunday Express Book of the Year, for A Landing on the Sun
• 1998: Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for Best New Play, for Copenhagen
• 1998: London Evening Standard Award for Best Play, for Copenhagen
• 2000: Tony Award for Best Play (USA) for Copenhagen
• 2000: New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play of the 1999-2000 Season for Copenhagen
• 2002: Whitbread Best Novel Award for Spies (the overall Whitbread Prize went to his wife, Claire Tomalin)
• 2003: Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia Region) for Spies
• 2003: London Evening Standard Award for Best Play, for Democracy
• 2003: Golden PEN Award for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".^[17]
• 2005 Honorary DLitt from the University of Birmingham^[18]
• 2006: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates^[19]

He is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society,^[20] and declined a CBE and a Knighthood in 1989 and 2003 respectively.^[21]

Bibliography[]

Novels[]

• The Tin Men (1965)
• The Russian Interpreter (1966)
• Towards the End of the Morning (US title: Against Entropy) (1967)
• A Very Private Life (1968)
• Sweet Dreams (1973)
• The Trick of It (1989)
• A Landing on the Sun (1991)^[22][23]
• Now You Know (1993)
• Headlong (1999)
• Spies (2002)
• Skios (2012)

Plays[]

• The Two of Us, four one-act plays for two actors (1970) Black and Silver, Mr. Foot, Chinamen, and The new Quixote

• and Donkeys' Years (1977)
• (1977)
• The Cherry Orchard trans. Chekhov (1978)
• Balmoral (1978)
• The Fruits of Enlightenment trans. Tolstoy (1979)
• Liberty Hall (1980) (revised version of Balmoral)
• (1980)
• Noises Off (1982)
• Three Sisters trans. Chekhov (1983, revised 1988)
• Number One (1984) translated from Jean Anouilh's Le Nombril
• Benefactors (1984)
• Wild Honey trans. Chekhov (1984)
• The Seagull trans. Chekhov (1986)
• Uncle Vanya trans. Chekhov (1986)
• Balmoral (1987) (further revised version)
• The Sneeze (1988) based on short stories and plays of Chekov
• First and Last (1989)
• Exchange trans. adapted Yuri Trifonov (1990)
• (1990)
• (1990)
• (1990)
• Audience (1991)
• Plays: Two, Methuen (1991), (1994) ISBN 978-0-413-66080-0
• Here (1993)
• , a version of Jacques Offenbach's La Belle Hélène (1995)
• (1998)
• Copenhagen (1998)
• Plays: Three, Methuen (2000)
• Democracy (2003) [1][2]
• Afterlife (2008) [3]
• (2014) ISBN 9780571313938

Short fiction[]

• Speak After The Beep: Studies in the Art of Communicating With Inanimate and Semi-Animate Objects (1995).

Non-fiction[]

• The Day of the Dog, articles reprinted from The Guardian (1962).
• The Book of Fub, articles reprinted from The Guardian (1963).
• On the Outskirts, articles reprinted from The Observer (1964).
• At Bay in Gear Street, articles reprinted from The Observer (1967).
• The Original Michael Frayn, a collection of the above four, plus nineteen new Observer pieces.
• Constructions, a volume of philosophy (1974).
• Celia's Secret: An Investigation (US title The Copenhagen Papers ), with David Burke (2000).
• The Human Touch: Our part in the creation of the universe (2006).
• Stage Directions: Writing on Theatre, 1970-2008 (2008), his path into theatre and a collection of the introductions to his plays.
• Travels with a Typewriter (2009), a collection of Frayn's travel pieces from the 1960s and 70s from the Guardian and the Observer.
• My Father's Fortune: A Life (2010), a memoir of Frayn's childhood.

Notes[]

References[]

• Theatre Record and its annual Indexes

External links[]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Michael Frayn

• Michael Frayn at British Council: Literature
• Michael Frayn at the British Film Institute
• Shusha Guppy (Winter 2003). "Michael Frayn, The Art of Theater No. 15". The Paris Review. Winter 2003 (168).
• Profile on BBC Four (archived 2007-10-21)
• Michael Frayn at the Internet Broadway Database
• Michael Frayn at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Profile at United Agents
• On Doollee
• Michael Frayn at IMDb