Novelist and playwright Michael Frayn’s advice for success is to write the same thing over and over again, a path the astonishingly diverse writer has certainly not followed himself
MICHAEL FRAYN is one of Britain's greatest and oddest writers. New York Timescritic Frank Rich has said his biggest commercial hit, the backstage farce Noises Off, "is, was, and probably always will be the funniest play written in my lifetime". But Frayn defies categorisation through his astonishing diversity: a stage farce will be followed by a play examining the most sombre of issues; a novel like Towards the End of the Morning– generally agreed to be second only to Evelyn Waugh's Scoop in its hilarious treatment of journalism – by a work of deep seriousness or a haunting evocation of childhood. A film comedy for John Cleese, Clockwise,was preceded by a book about philosophy and followed 20 years later by another, The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe. He's also regarded as Britain's finest translator of Chekhov.
Tall and lean to the point of spindliness, all knees and elbows, Frayn carefully folds himself onto a couch in the foyer of the little London hotel where we meet. He's 75 now, and his bony face creases into laughter lines as he leans back to discuss his work and the b*spoke production of Benefactors, directed by Lynne Parker, which opens at the Samuel Beckett Theatre on July 2nd. Though he has enjoyed international success as a novelist and playwright, his elusiveness and the shifting nature of his public image (or lack of it) is not something he particularly relishes.
“I think image matters a great deal,” he says, smiling mischievously. “I can’t think of any advice I’d give to a young writer except that if you want to succeed, write the same thing over and over again. Change the detail slightly, change the title, but basically do the same thing until people get used to it. With any luck, when they get used to it they’ll start to like it. What’s disastrous is to try and do different things, because people just don’t recognise the product. It’s a very reasonable desire in customers. If you go to the supermarket and buy a packet of cornflakes, you expect to get cornflakes, not sometimes cornflakes and sometimes baked beans in the packet. And if you want to establish a brand name as a writer it’s best to produce cornflakes every time. And I think it’s a hindrance that I haven’t been able to do that – I’ve only been able to do whatever ideas came into my head, and they haven’t always been consistent.”
There is, of course, a consistency of sorts – certainly an unmistakable voice – in Frayn’s work, where the page or the stage is a battleground for a contest between order and chaos; and a laughably uneven contest it is as he examines the need to impose our ideas on the world around us, to bring structure to the unknowable, to make arrangements for that which cannot be arranged. “Farce is sometimes seen as remote from life,” he says, “and when I first started to write farce, serious interviewers would sometimes ask me: ‘Why do you write farce? Why do you not write about life as it is?’ And I couldn’t imagine what their lives were like. I certainly don’t seek farce out. I would like to live a dignified life, more like a philosophical comedy than a farce, but farce has a tendency to come after me.”
Not that Benefactorsis a farce, though there are moments of high humour. The central theme is the fallibility of liberal idealism faced with the realities of politics and big business. Written in 1984 but set mostly in the 1970s, it involves a visionary young architect, David, charged with turning a decaying urban area into high-rise flats, and the interplay between David and his wife, Jane, and their friends: Colin, an embittered journalist, and his pathetic wife Sheila. So David needs to help society (while not understanding society's needs) by designing high-rises that nobody but planners and politicians want, and on a more intimate level he and Jane are trying to help Colin and Sheila.
" Benefactorsis partly a comedy, but a lot of it is not funny at all," says Frayn. "I don't know what happened in Ireland, but in Britain, if you wanted to build social housing, if you wanted to build for a local council and you wanted to get the money, then you had to follow the government guidelines on height, and in order to get more buildings built, throughout the 1950, 1960s and 1970s the government kept raising the yardstick; they kept rising the number of floors you had to build in order to get a grant. Architects often get blamed for high-rise flats, but it wasn't in fact really the architects, it was the government who required architects to build high. And then suddenly everyone lost faith in high-rise and it stopped. And then, in the way of things, there was a counter movement, a counter fashion, and after a few years some people started to look at the high-rise buildings again and say that if various things were put right, and the lifts were maintained, then they could work perfectly well."
MICHAEL FRAYN WAS BORN in London and after learning Russian as part of his National Service read Moral Sciences at Cambridge. He became a reporter and humorous columnist on the Guardianand, later, the Observerand began writing plays in 1970, though he did not achieve any degree of success for nearly 10 years. His 10 novels include Headlong(shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize), The Tin Men(winner of the 1966 Somerset Maugham Award), The Russian Interpreter(1967 Hawthornden Prize) and Spies(winner of the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, 2002). Productions of his plays have won major awards on Broadway and in the West End.
He has always been keen on collaboration and has often revised or rewritten parts of his plays for new productions over the years. He admires actors. “Actors often get a bad press, and people think of them as spoiled and egocentric, but that’s absolutely not my experience of actors. In my experience they tend to be more collaborative than other professions because it’s just so frightening standing up there on stage on the first night. There are awful s**** in the acting profession as in any other, of course, but I’ve found they are great at helping each other out in a common cause and in a very difficult situation.”
When Noises Offwas filmed 1992, Americanised by screenwriter Marty Kaplan, there was a problem because Americans don't do failure and chaos except in real life. After worrying previews, the director, Peter Bogdanovich, rang Frayn. "He explained to me that in popular American cinema there has to be an upbeat ending. My play ends with the cast having made an absolute balls-up of doing this farce. That's the end of my play. But before the film ends, as he explained, the cast have to be made to feel that they are in a success that will go to Broadway and they have to have sorted out all their personal relationships and learned something. So I had to think of a way of rewriting the end of the film which achieved all those goals."
Even though the central theme of Benefactorsseems a little distant now, it will not be updated for Dublin because the framework – the building of high-rise flats in the 1970s – is inflexibly locked into history. "If you have a play about the building of the railways, then you can't update it and make it about the introduction of broadband or something. People understand that the railways were built in the middle of the 19th century."
Frayn becomes most animated when he talks about Chekhov – “I wouldn’t like to claim that I have been more successful than anyone else, but at any rate I can see from reading him in the Russian that he is slightly more idiosyncratic than people suppose. Chekhov is a comic writer. He began as a comic writer and he made his reputation as a comic writer and even when he became a serious literary writer of stories for the page he still hadn’t made any headway as a playwright and his first successes as a playwright were writing commercial comedies.
"He adapted quite slowly from comic writing to serious writing. It's no secret that he went on insisting that those last four plays were comedies. In the case of The Cherry Orchard, which in some ways is the most painful of them, he describes it as a vaudeville, which approximates to a farce. I don't think he was just pulling people's legs. I don't think he was completely misguided about his own work. . . . People kept saying it was a tragedy and he kept saying it was a comedy. Well, what did he mean?
“I think he meant that he wanted the plays to be done lightly, and offhandedly, and not as melodramas. Not as a series of great speeches about life or whatever, but with the kind of casualness with which most people live their lives, saying rather ordinary things about rather ordinary matters with the pain of life concealed beneath the ordinary surface.”
In this newspaper Lynne Parker this month said: “I’ve come to the conclusion that all plays are comedies in one way or another, and that humour helps us retain a sense of perspective.” It seems we can look forward to a great meeting of minds – or a meeting of great minds – here.
Benefactorspreviews from Tuesday and opens on Thursday at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin