Michael Frayn

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

Michael Frayn

FRSL
Born (1933-09-08) 8 September 1933
Mill Hill, Middlesex, England
Occupation
  • Reporter
  • columnist
  • novelist
  • playwright
  • screenwriter
NationalityBritish
Period1962–present
GenreFarce, historical fiction, philosophy
SpouseGillian Palmer[1][2]
Claire Tomalin (1993–)[3][4]
Children3 daughters including
Rebecca Frayn[5]
RelativesFinn Harries[6]
Jack Harries[7]

Early life

Frayn was born at Mill Hill (then in Middlesex) to Thomas Allen Frayn, a deaf 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. Frayn's sister would also later work at Harrods, as a children's hairdresser.[9][10] He 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.

Works

The 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'.[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."

His 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. He has also 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 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.

He 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]

He is now considered to be Britain's finest translator of Anton Chekhov[14] (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard) as well as 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) and a number of Chekhov's smaller plays for an evening called The Sneeze (originally performed on the West End by Rowan Atkinson).

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

In 1980, he 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.

Frayn's wife, Claire Tomalin, is a biographer and literary journalist.[15]

Awards

He is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society,[19] and declined a CBE and a Knighthood in 1989 and 2003 respectively.[20]

Bibliography

Novels

Plays
Black and Silver, Mr. Foot, Chinamen, and The new Quixote
  • Alphabetical Order and Donkeys' Years (1977)
  • Clouds (1977)
  • The Cherry Orchard trans. Chekhov (1978)
  • Balmoral (1978)
  • The Fruits of Enlightenment trans. Tolstoy (1979)
  • Liberty Hall (1980) (revised version of Balmoral)
  • Make and Break (1980)
  • Noises Off (1982)
  • Three Sisters trans. Chekhov (1983, revised 1988)
  • Number One (1984) translated from Jean Anouilh's Le Nombril
  • Benefactors (1984)
  • Wild Honey trans. Chekhov (1984)
  • The Seagull trans. Chekhov (1986)
  • Uncle Vanya trans. Chekhov (1986)
  • Balmoral (1987) (further revised version)
  • The Sneeze (1988) based on short stories and plays of Chekov
  • First and Last (1989)
  • Exchange trans. adapted Yuri Trifonov (1990)
  • Listen to This: Sketches and Monologues (1990)
  • Jamie on a Flying Visit; and Birthday (1990)
  • Look Look (1990)
  • Audience (1991)
  • Plays: Two, Methuen (1991), (1994) ISBN 978-0-413-66080-0
  • Here (1993)
  • La Belle Vivette, a version of Jacques Offenbach's La Belle Hélène (1995)
  • Alarms and Excursions: More Plays than One (1998)
  • Copenhagen (1998)
  • Plays: Three, Methuen (2000)
  • Democracy (2003)
  • Afterlife (2008)
  • Matchbox Theatre: Thirty Short Entertainments (2014) ISBN 9780571313938

Short fiction
  • Speak After The Beep: Studies in the Art of Communicating With Inanimate and Semi-Animate Objects (1995).

Non-fiction
  • The Day of the Dog, articles reprinted from The Guardian (1962).
  • The Book of Fub, articles reprinted from The Guardian (1963).
  • On the Outskirts, articles reprinted from The Observer (1964).
  • At Bay in Gear Street, articles reprinted from The Observer (1967).
  • The Original Michael Frayn, a collection of the above four, plus nineteen new Observer pieces.
  • Constructions, a volume of philosophy (1974).
  • Celia's Secret: An Investigation (US title The Copenhagen Papers ), with David Burke (2000).
  • The Human Touch: Our part in the creation of the universe (2006).
  • Stage Directions: Writing on Theatre, 1970-2008 (2008), his path into theatre and a collection of the introductions to his plays.
  • Travels with a Typewriter (2009), a collection of Frayn's travel pieces from the 1960s and 70s from the Guardian and the Observer.
  • My Father's Fortune: A Life (2010), a memoir of Frayn's childhood.

Notes
  1. Gyles Brandreth (27 June 2002). "A closed book opens". The Telegraph. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
  2. Hanks, Robert (17 November 2002). "Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin: A marriage between the sheets". The Independent. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
  3. "The ultimate twinset: Jack and Finn Harries!".
  4. Rainey, Sarah (14 September 2012). "YouTube videos funded our gap year travels". The Telegraph. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
  5. Andrew Billen (23 April 2009). "Michael Frayn on his very current Alphabetical Order". The Times. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
  6. Miller, Michael W. (6 January 2016). "Michael Frayn's 'Noises Off' Returns to Broadway". The Wall Street Journal.
  7. John Walsh @johnhenrywalsh (24 March 2013). "Michael Frayn: Farce and the uncertainty principle". The Independent. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
  8. "Michael Frayn British author and translator," Encyclopædia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Frayn Retrieved 6 August 2017.
  9. My Father's Fortune, A Life by Michael Frayn, Faber and Faber, 2010, pp. 12-14, 28-29, 225
  10. 2009 Interview in the Observer
  11. "Interview with Michael Frayn". British Library (sound recording).
  12. 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.
  13. "Michael Frayn". IMDb.
  14. 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?
  15. "Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin: A marriage between the sheets". 17 November 2002.
  16. "Golden Pen Award, official website". English PEN. Retrieved 3 December 2012.
  17. "Honorary Graduates of the University of Birmingham since 2000" (PDF). Retrieved 16 July 2015.
  18. "Saint Louis Literary Award - Saint Louis University". www.slu.edu. Archived from the original on 23 August 2016. Retrieved 25 July 2016.
  19. "National Secular Society Honorary Associates". National Secular Society. Retrieved 26 August 2019.
  20. "Some who turned the offer down". The Guardian.
  21. 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.
  22. New Statesman and Society. IV, 13 September 1991, p. 39.

References
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