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, north London (then in
Middlesex), to Thomas Allen Frayn, an
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. After the slump in asbestos prices, Frayn's sister supported the family by also working at Harrods, as a children's hairdresser.[9][10]
The play Copenhagen deals with a historical event, a 1941 meeting between the Danish
physicistNiels 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."
He has 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 At Bay in Gear Street, 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.
Frayn 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]
Translation
Frayn learned Russian during his period of National Service. Frayn is now considered to be Britain's finest translator of
Anton Chekhov[14] (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard), including 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). From four of Chekhov's short stories and four of his one-act plays Frayn devised The Sneeze (originally performed on the West End by
Rowan Atkinson).
^Fiona Maddocks, "The History Play Man; Daring: Frayn's Drama Slips in and out of Rhyming Couplets 'To Blur the Distinction between Theatre and Life Just as Rheinhardt Did'", The Evening Standard, 3 June 2008.
^Donald Rayfield, "Review: Chekhov: Four Plays and Three Jokes by Sharon Marie - adapting the four major plays", Translation and Literature
Vol. 20, No. 3, Translating Russia, 1890–1935 (Autumn 2011), pp. 408–410?
^John Banville. 1992. "Playing House. Rev. of A Landing on the Sun by Michael Frayn and Daughters of Albion by A. N. Wilson. The New York Review of Books. 14 May 1992.
^New Statesman and Society. IV, 13 September 1991, p. 39.