Michael Frayn is just about to turn 90. What has been clear in the past few years is that there will be no more novels or plays. But he can still write wonderful prose – comic, probing and philosophic.
He is too much the buttoned down Englishman to engage in direct self-expression; ironically his second wife is the acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin. In lieu of a straightforward autobiography he offers here a succession of essays about friends, teachers and colleagues over the years.
The first is about Bamber Gascoigne, his oldest and best friend from their days as undergraduates in Cambridge. If that name sounds vaguely familiar it is because Bamber with his fuzzy aureole of blond, curly hair and his beatific smile presided over University Challenge for several decades.
The book’s two best chapters are, not unsurprisingly, on the theatre. In the first playwright Peter Nichols and his wife Ursula fetch up as neighbours of the Frayns. Nichols’ first play, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, a directly autobiographical piece about two parents and their severely disabled child, was played not as the expected tragedy, but as disconcerting comedy. Nichols introduced Frayn to the world of theatre and its rituals. Most valuable of all he met Michael Blakemore, the director of Joe Egg and subsequently of 10 of his own plays.
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The second great chapter is devoted to Blakemore and his working relationship with Frayn. Its centrepiece is their painstaking work on Noises Off. The play is complex in its staging demands, since it involves a play within a play. Blakemore sought clarification so that the audience understood fully what was going on. He also supplied a good deal of the farcical business which considerably enlivens the play.
The last chapter is about Frayn’s relationship with his body, something you only notice when it starts to go wrong. At 90 the list of what is going wrong is ever accumulating. He edges up on the idea of eternity by declaring: “The present tense is enough. I not only shall have enjoyed it – I am, and you are, enjoying it now.” The ending makes clear that this is Frayn’s last book, a stocktaking and a leave-taking. It is a strong finish.
