Michael Frayn and Germany
Monday, September 8th, 2008Ford Madox Ford quite rightly advised that one should not meet one’s life heroes. Luckily for me with Michael Frayn, who is celebrating his 75th birthday today, this wasn’t at all the case. When I was introduced to him whilst working on the German translation of Democracy, he couldn’t be more modest and relaxed. Already as a student I had hugely admired a man who was not only a major dramatist but with incredible ease also wrote trenchant commentary for the Observer, shot wonderfully atmospheric portraits of cities for the BBC, did the hilarious script for John Cleese’s Clockwise, translated Chekhov better than anybody else in the English language and into the bargain was the author of novels like Headlong which combined the qualities of a thriller with a knowledge of Bruegel hardly seen even with art historians.
My own theatrical tastes were formed when in the early 1980s at the age of 22 I came to London for a year to do a postgraduate diploma course in English Studies and went more to theatres and rehearsal rooms than to classes and libraries. Sitting in the Savoy Theatre in 1982 and marvelling at the ingenuity of plot construction brought out by Michael Blakemore’s world première of Noises Off I couldn’t have imagined that 25 years later I would be working on the same author’s Donkeys’ Years and in the process understand his own description of translating Chekhov, as told to the Guardian’s Nicholas Wroe in 1999: “It is also a practical course in play writing because what you discover is that these plays are all plot, they have very strong story lines, and every line advances the business of the play. It can be as if you’re writing a great play yourself. It’s like driving a Rolls Royce. An exhilarating feeling.” Donkeys’ Years taught me more about the mechanics of comedy, the way its pace needs to be varied or how a punchline is set up than any other text I was involved with. No matter how often as a dramaturg you read or see a play in a run-through, its subtler points you only get to know when translating it.
My fellow dramaturgs sometimes ask: “What, you’re seriously telling me the same man wrote Noises Off and Copenhagen?” With the latter Frayn achieved the rare feat that a play’s form perfectly mirrors its content. And with Democracy surprisingly the intricacies of German politics in the 1970s and the affair involving the East German spy Günter Guillaume found as receptive a British audience as had the earlier play about Bohr, Heisenberg and quantum physics, both running well at the National and later in the West End. In Democracy Frayn’s inventions are far more interesting than the more documentary parts. His Guillaume is a carbon copy of Chancellor Willy Brandt. Their relationship not only parallels the one between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but also Don Juan and Leporello’s. The refugee from Nazi Germany and the Communist spy both necessarily have a number of identities and in many situations are not at all sure on which one they should rely. Frayn manages to recreate the most moving moments of Brandt’s career like the kneefall at the Warsaw monument and the excitement during the failed attempt to dethrone him as Chancellor and install the Conservative Rainer Barzel instead who had already sent a detailed timetable for his takeover of the Palais Schaumburg. And the play’s second half with Brandt’s painful slide from power is marked by a touching sadness. But even then there are brilliant one-liners like the Chancellor’s greatest fear to open “my eyes in some bleak hospital ward and finding Herbert Wehner praying over me”. No German author would be capable of a mixture like that.
For the Berlin première at the Renaissance Theatre there couldn’t be a more suitable date than 6th May 2004, exactly thirty years after Brandt stepped down as Chancellor. In the postscript to the published text Frayn recalls how he had spent some time as a journalist in Berlin in 1972, a city “left marvellous but functionless deep inside East Germany, like a luxury liner that had somehow become beached in the sandy wastes of the Mark Brandenburg”. Already then Brandt for him was “one of the most attractive public figures of the twentieth century” who went on to achieve “his great goal. This is the most difficult thing of all to understand about him. He performed that one single act that makes its mark upon the world, that defines and validates a life, and that eludes almost everybody.” This single act being of course Brandt’s “Ostpolitik” which was of special interest to Frayn as he had spent his army years as an English-Russian interpreter. As a journalist he often wrote about Eastern Europe. In 1972 in Berlin he discovered “the Federal Republic’s secret ransoming of the Democratic Republic’s political prisoners, and the equally secret payments it made to have people allowed out of East Germany to rejoin their families in the West. The income was so vast that it covered something like 20 per cent of the GDR’s chronic balance-of-payments deficit in ‘inter-German’ trade.” He was “begged by officials of Amnesty International not to refer to it in the articles I was writing, for fear of jeopardising it.”
Frayn’s friend Peter Merseburger maintains that politics is mostly ‘terribly banal’ and for the dramatist “the events of 1974 were no exception. Among the banalities, nevertheless, were many strands of powerful personal feeling, of loyalty and jealousy, of courage and despair. It was really the sheer complexity of this mixture that finally decided me to write the play.” During a platform discussion at the National Theatre in 2003 Frayn confessed: “For a long time I’ve been absolutely fascinated by Germany. I like Germany very much, and I’m very absorbed in its history. Modern German history is absolutely crucial to Europe. Germany is right in the middle of Europe, and European history, for better or worse, has happened around Germany.” This strong sympathy which is hardly shared to such an extent by other leading British dramatists even leads him to the contention that the Germans got a perfectly normal sense of humour, something many of Frayn’s fellow countrymen would doubt.
When translating Democracy it was fascinating to deal with a play set in the country of the target language. This involved bringing back into German direct quotations, others rewritten by the author as well as dialogue completely invented by him. Frayn explained his method at the National Theatre: “All the dialogue in this play is fictitious, even Brandt’s public speeches. I’ve used the real speeches, but have foreshortened them, pushed them together, to make a coherent text on a particular subject. But most of the conversations in this play certainly never happened and couldn’t have happened. I don’t suppose for a moment that Brandt and Guillaume talked together the way they do in this play, and I can’t honestly imagine any sane human being thinking they would.” Obviously a number of key sentences had to be absolutely historically accurate. But there were also a few instances when I tried to be overly correct according to the sources, and Frayn was invariably right to insist on “what my Brandt is saying”. Anyway, the most compelling passages were all his own whether they concerned the relationship between Brandt and Guillaume or Brandt’s multiple personality so neatly pinpointed by having him quote Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” In a particularly moving passage Frayn even brings Brandt face to face with one of his former selves: “That’s the strangest thing of all about Herbert Frahm. The fact that I was him and he was me. What was it like, being him? I look back, and all that time has vanished behind a thick grey veil, like the old Lübeck waterfront in the fog on a winter morning. What became of him, when Willy Brandt took over his body and his student cap? Sometimes I catch a glimpse of him. Out of the window of the train. In a waiting crowd. A solemn boy, glancing up at me with a speculative look in his eye. What does he make of me? But then he turns, and goes away into some other life where I can never follow…”
Whilst preparing to write the play Frayn had not reread Shakespeare’s histories but Don Carlos and Wallenstein. Neal Ascherson seemed surprised by this allegiance to Schiller. In an article for the Observer under the headline “What made Günter grass?” he asked: “But why Germany? Michael Frayn once seemed the most sensitively English of living writers, ears and eyes tuned to the details of suburban comedy and class-conscious embarrassment in outer London, Fleet Street or the country-cottage belt. His best foreign language was always Russian, followed by French. And yet in Copenhagen and now in Democracy, and, to some extent, in his latest novel Spies, he has moved compulsively towards German themes.” Frayn told him: “In Germany, I have this feeling of being at home, in some hyper-real way. France and Italy really are abroad and that’s their charm, but Germany is a dream-like version of this country. The most banal things are charged with familiarity.“ When I did an interview with him for the British Council in Berlin in 2004 and we met for breakfast the next morning Frayn had already been going for a walk through the Brandenburg Gate and one strongly felt his sheer excitement that this was possible again during his lifetime.
Being offered Democracy meant a lot to me, as I had heard Willy Brandt speak as a schoolboy at a rally in a Bavarian beer tent and out of admiration for him had joined the SPD. Even today when I balk at another imbecility of the current leadership and think about handing back my membership book, I tell myself: “Hold on, after all, this is still the party of Willy Brandt.” In March 2007 together with his German agent Eva Giesel I was invited to Petersham. During my year as a student at Ealing I had often come over to Richmond and Kew on the 65 bus. Remembering my favourite passage from Democracy I imagined my former self jumping off the platform of an anachronistic Roadmaster and telling him that I was going to have lunch with Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin. Naturally he would have sneered: “You must be joking, mate” and hurried off towards Ham House sucked up by the London fog.
