Theatre

In his Petersham garden Michael Frayn stands next to a model of the solar system with an amused, sceptical, smile on his face. The model’s only a garden ornament but, for a moment, it neatly evokes the wide-ranging imagination of a man who seems always to have multiple ideas spinning in orbit. In the plays, novels, and films he’s written since 1965, the Frayn brain has engaged with such diverse phenomena as drunk journalists, slamming doors, Brueghel paintings, quantum physicists, the odd politician, quite a few spies, and more than one scantily clad woman. Yet whether it’s farce or philosophy, prose or dialogue, one question seems repeatedly to leap out: To what extent can I trust my interpretation of the world?’ Feature continues

It’s the comic possibilities arising from this question that we’re here to discuss, since Frayn’s 1976 comedy ‘Donkeys’ Years’ is about to be revived in the West End. Set at an Oxbridge college reunion 20 years after most of the characters have graduated, it details the shenanigans that erupt as they try to recapture the levity and lusts of their youth. Central to the action is the Master’s wife – also a student from 20 years beforehand – who has remained indelibly imprinted on her male contemporaries’ memories for qualities unrelated to intellect. Blind as the proverbial bat, she fails to realise that a former lover hasn’t turned up, so when she goes to his room and declares her passion, she exposes herself to the wrong man, kicking off a catastrophic chain reaction.

Despite successfully wrestling with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for ‘Copenhagen’ and ’70s German politics in ‘Democracy’, Frayn confesses that he found the comparatively lightweight ‘Donkeys’ Years’ very hard to write.

‘Farce is extremely difficult,’ he declares. ‘To maintain its energy you need far more ideas than you think when you first set it up.’ He had similar misgivings about ‘Noises Off’, his hugely popular play within a play, described by Time Out New York as ‘the funniest comedy ever written’. Yet Frayn admits, ‘It seemed to me so complex that I didn’t know whether it could ever be staged. I thought when I was writing it that I’d disappeared off the edge of a cliff.’

While life in his plays and novels repeatedly erupts out of control, in person the lean, measured Frayn embodies an anxious – if wrily humorous – perfectionism. His study is a model of order, in contrast to the joyful, organic chaos of the room where his wife, biographer Claire Tomalin, works. Concerned that ‘Donkeys’ Years’ hasn’t aged too well , he’s worked hard to update it although Tomalin teases him, ‘You’re just like Auden or Wordsworth, always tinkering with things that were perfectly good to start off with.’ Frayn has learnt, however, that it’s impossible to gauge what audience responses will be: ‘As William Goldman wrote about Hollywood, when it comes to public taste, “Nobody knows anything.”’

The uncertainty principle seems stongly to govern Frayn’s approach to life. I ask him about the recurring theme in novels like ‘The Trick Of It’, ‘Headlong’, and ‘Spies’ of the fantasist who leaps to the wrong conclusions from what he observes, even though in doing so he often leads others to a hidden truth. Is this Frayn’s nightmare alter ego? He laughs: ‘No, I think as soon as things become unfamiliar, it becomes very hard to give any account of what we’re seeing. In ‘Headlong’ a man sees a picture, and becomes absolutely certain he’s looking at a Brueghel, regardless of the evidence, and sets about supporting that conviction. It happens very often that conviction precedes proof. And proof is supplied.’

One of the most significant occasions that awoke Frayn to the dangers of putting conviction before proof was when he visited Russia as a Cambridge student in 1956. ‘I was a schoolboy communist but after that visit I was converted from extremism to democracy.’ He remains galvanised by democracy’s overlapping intricacies, which he famously illustrated in his play of the same name. Discussing the downfall of German Chancellor Willy Brandt after a personal assistant was unmasked as a spy, he argues, ‘The cause was very complex: it was to do with his character, his state of health, the political condition of Germany, the state of opinion inside his party, world economic conditions… everything conspired. He once said himself that he might not have resigned if he hadn’t been trying to give up smoking.’

Apart from his shift from communism, the most important re-evaluation in the 72-year-old Frayn’s life came when he left his first wife. He describes it understatedly as ‘finding in middle-age that life was more emotionally complex than I had thought it to be’, but his ensuing silence is profound. He’s sustained good relations with his children: as borne out by the fact that his daughter, Rebecca, is directing the film version of his novel ‘Spies.’ And, as he and Tomalin work happily in their adjoining studies. the work continues to flood in; he’s about to write a screenplay of ‘Headlong’ and has a philosophy book coming out in September. ‘After that,’ he says with a twinkle in his eye, ‘ maybe I’ll retire’. But neither I nor, one suspects anyone else, believe him.