Michael Frayn - Writer HARDtalk

That is a summary of the news. Now it is time for HARDtalk. I speak to

one of Britain's finest writing talents, whose creativity defies a

simple label. Yes, Michael Frayn is a renowned playwright whose work

has ranged from high farce to cerebral intensity. But he's also

an acclaimed novelist and an accomplished translator from the

Russian of Chekhov and Tolstoy. Throughout his writing career he's

mixed high seriousness with a wicked sense of the absurd. Is

laughter an essential tool for the Michael Frayn, welcome to HARDtalk.

Nice to be here. I would like to start at the beginning of your

professional writing career. You joined the Manchester Guardian

newspaper and I wonder whether you still feel, these years later,

there is something of the report it in you? Yes, I think newspapers

were, in a way, where I felt most at home. Newspapers were where I

began and probably newspapers were where I should have stayed.

very surprised you say that given what has happened since. Was it the

nature of being a witness to events that appealed to you? You could

watch the way people behaved. don't know, I think, I have to say,

I think good, serious reporting is one of the hardest forms of writing

I have done. If you write fiction, if you make things up, the world is

already simplified inside your head. If you have to describe the world

out there in front of your eyes it is unbelievably complicated.

Everything is tangled together. In order to sort anything out to make

sense - that is very difficult. am fascinated by that answer

because it leads me to have thought I have had for a while when

thinking about your career. It is a thought about control. By moving

away from the factual reporting, reporting the world as it seems to

be, to creating worlds in your head you were giving yourself a new

level of control over the story. I wonder how important that was to

you? I think that is true. I don't think of it in terms of control,

but I think it is true that if you make things up you are the master

of your own universe.Not if you are trying to describe the universe out

there. In my meagre rear I went back to doing some serious

reporting. -- need-Korea. I went all over the place - I did a series

on Cuba. Germany as well, my interest in Germany began then, all

over the place. I sometimes thought that writers of fiction should be

required by law to go and do some reporting, just to remind them of

former foreign correspondent I quite like that idea. I was struck

by Lloyd, the figure of the director, the French it director it

was trying to make this play that is the centre of your drama --

frantic director. He thinks of himself as God, there are constant

references to him being God. In a way, that is the way you have been,

creating characters and moving stories along the way you wanted.

Is that a way of looking at it that appeals to you? You know, it is a

funny thing - in theory you are in charge of the world you invent, but

in fact, when you actually start writing the character, everyone

says this and everyone thinks this and it is just a silly, sentimental

way of looking at it - the characters seem to come to life.

They do seem to take over their own destiny to some extent. They begin

to say things themselves and do things themselves. However hard you

work to invent a plausible plot for them, to invent a life and

background, at some point that they knock it out of your hands and take

over. Is that really true? Yes. you think of an example right now

we have bee we have beeve key characters involved in you

found yourself going over in two directions you hadn't planned that

did not fit your story board or however you plan things out? Every

time, yes. I have often thought that fiction, what is most likely

is industrial manage a lot of workers and your own

vision, to get the workers doing the correct things, you have

targets, you want them to produce the goods for you, you have to find

some way of either bullying them or negotiating with them to come to

terms with them so they do a bit of your programme and Udal a bit of

their programme. -- so you do a bit of their programme. A play that is

popular in London at the moment, it is 30 years since you wrote it.

seem dated to you? I have done a lot of rewriting since. It was

revised at the National Theatre in 2000. That was by Jeremy cents. I

said to him - I have seen it so many times I can see where some of

the weak spots are and I would like to do some work on it. He said "I

would like you did a lot of work on at". He had some good ideas for

rewriting. I did a great deal of work then. I haven't done any re-

writing on this particular go, it is like one of those houses in the

country that has been done up over and over again. The plaster has

been reworked, repainted. It is very difficult to know whether you

have got the original house or something completely new. He's

writing funny harder than writing serious? I think any sort of

writing, even writing a thank you for a Christmas present is

difficult. Cut the lead when you get started things to begin to take

over -- hopefully. Everyone says the story about the old actor dying,

he says "yes, it is hard dying, but not as hard as fast". It is

difficult to write, it is complicated, but also because you

have to keep inventing more and more things. Also, the thing about

absurdism it is, while it looks like total chaos, it is the most

highly organised form of physical drama. It has to be highly

organised, yes. You have a reputation for being a highly

intellectual writer and artist. Does it stick in York for all, a

little bit, that the play that most people are most familiar with is

the one that has the most slapstick in it, the most obvious laughs?

I like it! I like laughing myself. It doesn't happen as often as you

might expect, laughing in the theatre. There is a wonderful play

called one man, two governors, that is wonderful, laughing and laughing

in the theatre. When the play finishers and I see people laughing,

it is great. It strikes me that there is something painful about

the laughter. Certainly in noises Off, everything is going wrong. It

is human beings trying to bring order to the chaos and failing and

failing. Maybe that is a serious thing that runs through your work,

in the comedies as well as in the serious stuff. I think all, these

are serious, if there is no serious issue, there is nothing to laugh at.

Well, Laurel and Hardy doesn't really have a seriousness.

serious message - you have to see them losing their dignity in some

way, attempting to be a dignified citizen and being undercut.

there is a gap between what the human being would like to achieve

and what they can achieve? Yes. Why do people laugh at noises off? When

it was first done, people said OK, it works for this country, because

people know about English sex farces. It is kind of a pastiche.

It would never worked anywhere else because they don't all about that.

But it was good all over the world. Why? I think it is because we all

have some kind of feel inside ourselves that we will break down -

we won't be able to go on with the show. And people do break down,

they can't go out and face the world. I think if you see it

happening to somebody else, an idiot, they are having difficulty

keeping the show going, it releases the tension inside yourself. I find

it fascinating, as you say, it has been successful around the world.

It has been playing in all sorts of cities. Broadway, Paris, Europe,

beyond Europe. I just wonder whether it, right now, it appeals

to people around the world because there is total mayhem and it is

very funny but it's sort of doesn't matter that much. It all comes sort

of right in the end, which is the nature of farce, otherwise it would

be a tragedy. Is that what we need right now? A good laugh, and the

belief that it will come right in the end? It comes at sort of

writing the end, in the sense that it goes completely wrong but they

put some kind of face on it. They managed to just get out of it with

a smile on their faces. That is probably what we do in life, isn't

it was like everything goes completely wrong, but with any luck

you get out of it with enough grace to a kind of... (LAUGHTER). That

sounds like my philosophy. Moving to a different sort of way, and I

am aware that not everybody will have seen some of these plays, but

one particular place strikes a chord and that is the play called

Copenhagen. That recreate the meeting that happened between a

leading nuclear German scientist Heisenberg who worked for the Nazi

government and a Danish nuclear scientist. You work with fact, but

then you imagine what would have happened in a meeting between the

two. How important was it for you, coming from being a journalist, to

get this right? To get all the details? I worked very hard to find

that everything that was known about these two men. The difficulty

was that they were old friends, very close friends and

collaborators. And both brilliant nuclear scientists. Very great

nuclear physicists, atomic physicists. It was really

Heisenberg who was chiefly responsible for a quantum mechanics.

The problem was, in 1941 they were on opposite sides. This was very

embarrassing for Neil's sport to receive a visit from Heisenberg.

The meeting went wrong, they could never quite agree on what

Heisenberg had said. What every pause, the Danish side has got

angry and the conversation was broken off. I tried to respect the

records in so far as they existed. What I then tried to do was imagine

what was inside the heads of the two men. Sure, but what I'm driving

at is whether it really matters. I think one academic in the States

who write about these things and studies then said that what you are

presented was a false picture of Heisenberg. Essentially you had

become an apologist for Heisenberg, avoiding his nut seat party

sympathies -- Nazi. Let me make it clear, Heisenberg was not a member

of the Nazi party, he had been persecuted by them. The question is

whether he was prepared to go too far to serve them. I don't think

that commentator thinks that he was a Nazi. No, I didn't mean to imply

that. My question is - does that really mattered to the quality of

It via was sending an apology for Heisenberg or attacking him, it

misses the point of the play. it was first put on in New York his

own son came to see it on the first night. What did he say to you

afterwards? It was a hair-raising meeting. No it's run high on first

night and I suddenly saw this tall, commanding young man. He said, a

cure Heisenberg was not like my father. I never saw my father at

express feelings for anything except music. But then he said

something which showed he understood the point of historical

drama. He said, but I see in a play that you have to have characters

who are more forthcoming than that. That is why I write fiction about

real characters and events. Every dramatist from Shakespeare onwards.

The point is to try to do imagine that things, CBE causal connections

in things that are not apparent in the world and tried to imagine that

things that cannot be on the historical record, like what goes

on inside people's heads. There were and real person that I wonder

if you have ever tried to characterise or write about ease

yourself. You said something about shekel of up. You said that you

admire the fact that in his wonderful works he never tried to

put himself in them. -- Chekhov. He was a very modest man. He was

extraordinarily absent from his work. Art you absent from your us?

Fairly apps and, yes. They have to find in their characters something

that they recognise in themselves. Just as the actors then have to

find something in themselves to bring the characters to life. I

think it is quite difficult to write about oneself. In fact,

writing about my father. The apps water was going to come to next.

Writing primarily about your father, and your mother, being brought up

in the Second World War - has that lead you to want to explore

yourself a little bit more? Added not even really want to do it in

the book. I wanted to write about my father. But since part of my

father's experience was having a son and trying to get on with him

despite the fact that we were very different people, I had to put

myself in the book. I do not think my want to do anything more about

this. The story of your father is extraordinary because he was an

asbestos salesman at a time when no-one knew it was highly dangerous.

And of course used to bring vista of into the house and used to play

with it, not with that. I know that your sister, as a result of having

this in the house, was poisoned by it. I think so. She died of

mesothelioma. Andy many years later. It catches up, 20 or 30 years after

exposure to asbestos. My sister did not know whether it was my father's

is best as samples or not. but she could not think of many appear his

pistols in a light. My father used to give the samples to me and I

would saw them up a hacksaw and bank hols in them. This was in

London during the war and he progressed to Cambridge University

after that. You have lead through fascinating times and at Cambridge

it was the era of the will be and Maclean, the paranoia that went

with the Cold War and both sides of the ideological divide. You were a

flu and Russian speak and did lots of translation work. We were

approached by any intelligence services? Id two years' military

service and a was sent to Cambridge to learn Russian for the army

ration core. When I went back as an undergraduate some friends deny he

spoke Russian fixed the first exchange programme with a ration

University in Moscow. I think it was the first one. Because we were

still in the Army Reserve we had to ask permission and explained. We

did come into contact with military intelligence. Did they tried to

recruit you? The officer I approached said, if you need to any

one interesting at university you may take some part in Russian live

later, please let us know. I absolutely declined. The point of

the trip was that we were independent. We were just going as

students, not spies. If I had said years, they might have... group.

wonder what you had strong ideological positions of Europe and

then? Tinnies go you wrote the play cabby mac democracy, which looked

at the complicated politics of West Germany, in the context of the Cold

War. -- Democracy. I was a communist. A friend and I had an

independent communist cell. We had a Thank you independent communist

cell in the school. But it wore off. That is why Ireland and Russian

because I could see that Russia was the ideal society and a wanted to

know about it. The interest in Russia remained, the communism wore

off pretty quickly. Why? Were you disillusioned Kris Smith by Hungary

perhaps? Long before Hungary. It was 1956 when I was an

undergraduate. I can't remember now. I suppose I spent so much time

denying the of these events in front of our rise at school. I want

to bring it right up-to-date mark. It strikes me as a connection. In

Democracy you are portraying... when you look at British politics

today - the first Coalition since the war - are you interested in

engaging with that for a fiction? A new play? I would like to write a

play about the publication of England, that idea has fallen out

of no way. Particularly complex IDs in Germany because all German

governments are Coalition government. We have complexity

inside our and hence. But I said in the post trip to the play that you

can never have a Coalition in this country - the thought is impossible.

-- the postscript to the play. is in your head right now? Nothing.

It is an empty space. At the moment I have several plays being revised.

Is it stifling? Ku are still a creative artist and you want to get

on and you and there are constantly asking you to do revivals of all