Michael Frayn

Michael Frayn, FRSL (; born 8 September 1933) is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy.

Frayn's 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 in Mill Hill, north London (then in Middlesex), to Thomas Allen Frayn, an asbestos salesman from a working-class family of blacksmiths, locksmiths and servants, 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. Frayn's sister also supported the family by working at Harrods, as a children's hairdresser.

Frayn grew up in Ewell, Surrey, and was educated at Kingston Grammar School. Following two years of National Service, during which he learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, Frayn read Moral Sciences (Philosophy) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating in 1957. He then worked as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian and The Observer, where he established a reputation as a satirist and comic writer, and began publishing his plays and novels.

Theatre work Frayn's play Copenhagen deals with a historical event, a 1941 meeting between the Danish physicist Niels 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'. 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.

Frayn's 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 wrote in his book The Hot Seat "is, was, and probably always will be the funniest play written in my lifetime."

Novels Frayn's novels include Headlong (shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize), The Tin Men (won the 1966 Somerset Maugham Award), The Russian Interpreter (1967, Hawthornden Prize), Towards the End of the Morning, Sweet Dreams, A Landing on the Sun, A Very Private Life, Now You Know and Skios (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2012). His novel Spies was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction in 2002.

Non-fiction Frayn has written a book about philosophy, Constructions, and a book of his own philosophy, The Human Touch.

Frayn's 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.

Translation Frayn learned Russian during his period of National Service. Frayn is now considered to be Britain's finest translator of Anton Chekhov (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).

Frayn has also translated Yuri Trifonov's play Exchange, Leo Tolstoy's The Fruits of Enlightenment, and Jean Anouilh's Number One.

Television In 1980, Frayn presented the Australian journey of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys of the World. His journey took him from Sydney to Perth on the Indian Pacific, with side visits to the Lithgow Zig Zag and a journey on The Ghan's old route from Marree to Alice Springs shortly before the opening of the new line from Tarcoola to Alice Springs.

Personal life Frayn has three daughters with his first wife, Gillian Palmer: Rebecca, a documentary film maker, writer and actress; Susanna; and Jenny, a television producer. Frayn and his second wife, Claire Tomalin, a biographer and literary journalist, live in Petersham, London.

Awards

1966: Somerset Maugham Award, for The Tin Men 1975: London Evening Standard Award (Best Comedy), for Alphabetical Order 1976: Laurence Olivier Award (Comedy of the Year), for Donkeys' Years 1980: London Evening Standard Award (Best Comedy), for Make and Break 1982: London Evening Standard Award (Best Comedy), for Noises Off 1984: London Evening Standard Award (Best Play), for Benefactors 1990: International Emmy Awards (Best Drama), for First and Last (BBC) 1991: Sunday Express Book of the Year, for A Landing on the Sun 1998: Critics' Circle Theatre Awards (Best New Play), for Copenhagen 1998: London Evening Standard Award (Best Play), for Copenhagen 2000: New York Drama Critics' Circle Award (Best Foreign Play), for Copenhagen 2002: Whitbread Novel Award, for Spies (the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year Award went to his wife Claire Tomalin) 2002: Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Spies 2003: Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Europe and South Asia Best Book), for Spies 2003: London Evening Standard Award (Best Play), for Democracy 2005: Honorary DLitt from the University of Birmingham 2006: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates Frayn is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society, and declined a CBE and a knighthood in 1989 and 2003 respectively.