Michael Frayn
Michael Frayn is a notable contemporary British playwright and novelist, born in 1933 in Mill Hill, London. He navigated a challenging childhood marked by the loss of his mother at a young age and attended Kingston Grammar School after his family faced financial difficulties. Frayn's academic journey led him to Cambridge University, where he studied philosophy and became influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein. His career began in journalism, writing social satire for publications like the Manchester Guardian and the Observer. Frayn gained acclaim for his plays, most famously the farce "Noises Off" (1982), which cleverly examines the relationship between art and reality through a layered comedic structure. His works often explore themes of middle-class values, hypocrisy, and the absurdities of modern life, evident in both his novels and plays such as "Copenhagen" (1998) and "Democracy" (2003). Beyond drama, Frayn has written television documentaries and nonfiction, receiving numerous awards for his contributions to literature, including the Golden PEN Award for Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. His literary legacy continues with recent works, affirming his status as a significant figure in contemporary theatre and literature.
Michael Frayn
American playwright, novelist, journalist, and translator
- Born: September 8, 1933
- Place of Birth: London, England
Biography
Michael Frayn is a contemporary satirical playwright and novelist. He was born in 1933 in the London suburb of Mill Hill to Thomas Allen Frayn and Violet Alice Lawson. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Ewell, Surrey. Frayn’s mother died when he was twelve, and his father, a sales representative for an asbestos manufacturer, was unable to pay both a housekeeper and private school fees, so he enrolled the boy in Kingston Grammar School. A poor student, Frayn made up for his insecurities by becoming the class clown.
After leaving school in 1952, Frayn completed two years of mandatory national service as a corpsman in the Royal Artillery and as a Russian interpreter in the Intelligence Corps. Following his discharge, he studied philosophy at Cambridge University, becoming strongly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on the nature of language and reality. At Cambridge, Frayn also wrote a column for the university newspaper and collaborated on a student musical comedy.
After receiving his degree in 1957, Frayn was a reporter for the Manchester Guardian until 1959, when he began writing a column of social satire, collections of which were later published. He began working for the Observer in London in 1962, writing a humorous column until 1968. In 1960, he married Gillian Palmer; they had three daughters before divorcing in 1989. Frayn later remarried to biographer Claire Tomalin in 1993.
While with the Observer, Frayn wrote two television plays and four novels. In 1970, an American producer asked him to write a comic sketch for a London revue. When Frayn’s effort was rejected because it called for a baby’s diapers to be changed onstage, he wrote three more short plays and combined them under the title The Two of Us (1970). His subsequent plays gained increasing recognition from critics and the public, culminating in the enormously successful farce Noises Off (1982), which had the longest run in the illustrious history of the Savoy Theatre.
Frayn’s novels and plays share the same concerns as his satirical columns: middle-class human conventions, class snobbery, hypocrisy, trendiness, conflict with technology, and the absurdity of Cold War tensions. The Tin Men (1965), his first novel, depicts humorless computer specialists at an institute for automation research who aim to automate everything from sports to religion to literature. The Russian Interpreter (1966), based on his military experiences, looks at the confused motives of English and Russian spies. A Very Private Life (1968) satirizes the middle class’s obsessive concern with privacy by envisioning a future where the wealthy live comfortably in hermetically sealed boxes. Sweet Dreams (1973) dramatizes a middle-class Londoner’s vision of heaven, where everything reflects his earthly aspirations. The Trick of It (1989), an epistolary satire of academia, looks at the power of literature over life. Now You Know (1992) is a political satire centered on a freedom-of-information lobby.
Middle-class English values are also at the center of Frayn’s plays. The Sandboy (1971), concerned with the making of a television documentary about a celebrated city planner, contrasts what the main character says to the camera with what he actually believes and does, a dramatization of the Wittgensteinian paradox about what is real and what is a mere representation of the real. Alphabetical Order (1975) takes a comic look at the human need for order as a zealous young woman organizes the chaotic library of a failing newspaper, changing her fellow employees’ lives in the process. Frayn’s ambiguous attitude toward this character is typical of his approach to drama; he consistently confronts issues and values without didacticism.
The highly acclaimed, more serious Copenhagen (1998) dramatizes a 1941 meeting between the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, exploring whether the Nazis’ atomic bomb program failed because Heisenberg was unwilling to provide Adolf Hitler with the world’s most powerful weapon or because he simply did not understand how to build one. Copenhagen won several awards for drama, including the 1998 Critics' Circle Theatre Award and Evening Standard Theatre Award for best play, the 2000 Tony Award for best play, and the 2000 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best foreign play. After the play premiered, Frayn collaborated with actor David Burke, who played Bohr, to publish Celia's Secret (2000; released in the United States under the title The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue), a short nonfiction work concerning a mysterious bundle of papers he received during the production of the play that claimed to resolve the mysteries at its core.
Similarly acclaimed was Democracy (2003), about the 1973 Guillaume affair, in which it was discovered that West German chancellor Willy Brandt's secretary Günter Guillaume was an East German spy. Like Copenhagen, Democracy won the Critics' Circle Theatre Award and the Evening Standard Theatre Award for best play upon its premiere.
Perhaps Frayn’s most successful play has been the ingeniously complicated Noises Off, which won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Comedy and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 1982. This depiction of a third-rate repertory company rehearsing and performing a trashy sex comedy in the provinces seems to be little more than brilliant entertainment. Frayn, however, conceals his usual themes behind the facade of farce. The first act presents a dress rehearsal of the play, the second the backstage activity during an actual performance, and the third the chaotic onstage goings-on, showing the characters and their ever-changing relationships from three perspectives. The connection between art and reality is explored as the farcical nature of the characters in the play-within-the-play is imitated in real life, revealing the actors as hapless and confused as their onstage counterparts.
Frayn has been criticized for the lack of depth of his characters, who display considerable wit but little passion—a side effect of the mechanical precision with which he constructs his plays, particularly his farces. On the other hand, his plays have been favorably compared with those of such contemporaries as Alan Ayckbourn, Simon Gray, and Tom Stoppard, while his novels have been likened to the best works of Evelyn Waugh. Frayn has also written television documentaries and a treatise on the nature of perception, won an international reporting award for his articles about Cuba, and translated plays by Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Jean Anouilh.
Frayn has been highly awarded for his work throughout his career, which has continued into the twenty-first century. His 2002 novel Spies won the Whitbread Novel Award, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2003, he was awarded the Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature. In 2012, Frayn published the novel Skios. He also penned the plays Afterlife (2008) and Matchbox Theatre: Thirty Short Entertainments (2014). Frayn has also published nonfiction works, including Travels with a Typewriter (2009), an anthology of Frayn's travel piece, and two memoirs, My Father's Fortune: A Life (2010) and Among Others: Friendships and Encounters (2023).
Author Works
Drama:
The Two of Us, pr., pb. 1970
The Sandboy, pr. 1971
Alphabetical Order, pr. 1975
Donkeys’ Years, pr. 1976, pb. 1977
Clouds, pr. 1976
Liberty Hall, pr. 1980
Make and Break, pr., pb. 1980
Noises Off, pr., pb. 1982
Benefactors, pr., pb. 1984
Plays: One, pb. 1985
Balmoral, pr., pb. 1987 (revised version of Liberty Hall)
Listen to This: 21 Short Plays and Sketches, 1990
Look Look, pr., pb. 1990
Audience, pb. 1991
Plays: Two, pb. 1991
Here, pr., pb. 1993
Now You Know, pr., pb. 1995 (adaptation of his novel)
Alarms and Excursions: More Plays than One, pb. 1998
Copenhagen, pr., pb. 1998
Plays: Three, pb. 2000
Democracy, pr. 2003, pb. 2004
Crimson Hotel; and, Audience, pb. 2007
Afterlife, 2008
Matchbox Theatre: Thirty Short Entertainments, 2015
Long Fiction:
The Tin Men, 1965
The Russian Interpreter, 1966
Towards the End of the Morning, 1967 (pb. in U.S. as Against Entropy, 1967)
A Very Private Life, 1968
Sweet Dreams, 1973
The Trick of It, 1989
A Landing on the Sun, 1991
Now You Know, 1992
Headlong, 1999
Spies, 2002
Afterlife, 2008
Skios, 2012
Translations:
The Cherry Orchard, 1978 (of Anton Chekhov’s Vishnyovy sad)
The Fruits of Enlightenment, 1979 (of Leo Tolstoy’s Plody prosveshcheniya)
Three Sisters, 1983 (of Chekhov’s Tri sestry)
Number One, 1984 (of Jean Anouilh’s Le Nombril)
Wild Honey, 1984 (of an untitled play by Chekhov)
The Seagull, 1986 (of Chekhov’s Chayka)
Uncle Vanya, 1987 (of Chekhov’s Dyadya Vanya)
Plays, 1988 (of a selection of Chekhov’s plays)
The Sneeze, 1989 (an adaptation of several of Chekhov’s one-act plays and short stories)
Exchange, 1990 (an adaption from Yuri Trifonov)
Screenplays:
Clockwise, 1986
First and Last, 1989
Nonfiction:
The Day of the Dog, 1962
The Book of Fub, 1963 (pb. in U.S. as Never Put Off to Gomorrah, 1964)
On the Outskirts, 1964
At Bay in Gear Street, 1967
Constructions, 1974
Great Railway Journeys of the World, 1982
The Original Michael Frayn: Columns from the “Guardian” and “Observer,” 1983
Speak after the Beep: Studies in the Art of Communicating with Inanimate and Semi-Animate Objects, 1995
The Additional Michael Frayn, 2000
Celia’s Secret: The Copenhagen Papers, 2000 (with David Burke; pb. in U.S. as The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue, 2001)
The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe, 2007
Travels with a Typewriter, 2009
My Father’s Fortune: A Life, 2010
Among Others: Friendships and Encounters, 2023
Bibliography
Cushman, Robert. “Frayn and Farce Go Hand in Hand.” New York Times, 11 Dec. 1983, p. B1+.
Frayn, Michael, and Michael Blakemore. “Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (1998); M. Blakemore.” Interview by Duncan Wu. Making Plays: Interviews with Contemporary British Dramatists and Their Directors. Ed. Wu. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000, pp. 209–30.
Else, Liz. “Interview: All the World's a Stage.” New Scientist, 20 Sept. 2006, www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125701-400-interview-all-the-worlds-a-stage. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Glanz, James. “Of Physics, Friendship and the Atomic Bomb.” The New York Times, 21 Mar. 2000, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/review/041500032100bomb-theater.html. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Gottlieb, Vera. “Why This Farce?” New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 7.27, 1991, pp. 217–28.
Guppy, Shusha. “The Art of Theater No. 15.” The Paris Review, 2003, www.theparisreview.org/authors/5539/shusha-guppy. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Henry, William A., III. “Tugging at the Old School Ties.” Time, vol. 27, Jan. 1986, pp. 66–67.
Kaufman, David. “The Frayn Refrain.” Horizon, Jan.–Feb. 1986, pp. 33–36.
MacFarquhar, Larissa. “A Dry Soul Is Best.” New Yorker, 17 Oct. 2004, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/10/25/a-dry-soul-is-best. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Nelsson, Richard. “Michael Frayn at 90: A Miscellany of the Satirical Columnist's Finest Moments.” The Guardian, 8 Sept. 2023, www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/sep/08/michael-frayn-at-90. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Page, Malcolm, comp. File on Frayn. London: Methuen, 1994.
Simon, John. “Frayn and Refrayn.” Rev. of Benefactors and Wild Honey, by Michael Frayn. New York, 3 Sept. 1984, pp. 62–63.
Smith, David. “Difficult Stage.” New Statesman, 8 May 2006, pp. 42–43.