Stage Directions: Writing on Theatre 1970–2008

  • Michael Frayn
Faber and Faber: 2008. 288 pp. £20 0571240550 9780571240555 | ISBN: 0-571-24055-0

In Michael Frayn's 1998 play Copenhagen, physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, along with Bohr's wife Margrethe, reunite in the afterworld to work out the mystery of why Heisenberg visited Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. The play has stimulated tremendous debate about the people and events it depicts. Frayn's new book includes his writings about the play both before it was staged and in response to this debate. It is useful to have them collected here alongside Frayn's other writings about theatre over the past three decades.

Stage Directions reveals much about the mind behind Copenhagen, a play he admits gave the 'kiss of life' to a playwriting career that was flagging in the 1990s. Just a few years earlier, in 1985, Frayn's career had been at its peak, with three of his works running in London simultaneously. One chapter, entitled 'On the Roller Coaster', charts the frenzied, out-of-control lurching between failure and success that characterized his early writing. A sense of precariousness has remained with him, even after unqualified stage successes like Copenhagen. Frayn isn't afraid to wallow in his failures. This, together with his readiness to place the contributions of the directors and actors he has worked with far above his own efforts, makes for appealing reading.

Frayn's theatre work spans everything from comedy and farce, opera and film, to serious drama and a substantial body of translations of Anton Chekhov's plays. He fondly recalls his childhood theatrical efforts, first at toy theatre and then at magic and conjuring tricks. Some hilarious mishaps, with the scenery crashing down around one particularly spectacular failure, planted the very productive seeds of his later farces such as Donkeys' Years and Noises Off.

Michael Frayn's fascination with great men of history prompted his play Copenhagen. Credit: D. COOPER/PHOTOSTAGE

To date, Copenhagen is Frayn's only venture into science on stage. Indeed, Copenhagen and Noises Off seem so remote from one another that it is hard to believe they are by the same playwright. Copenhagen plumbs some of the most difficult scientific and moral questions of our time; in a sense, it forms a trilogy with Frayn's two most recent plays, Democracy and Afterlife. Apart from the single-word titles, these all reflect Frayn's abiding Germanic interests and fascination with 'great men' on the stage of history — Heisenberg and other physicists in Copenhagen, German chancellor Willy Brandt in Democracy and the Austrian (later American) theatre director Max Reinhardt in Afterlife. These men all met with failure and success. The plays probe the extent to which personal characteristics brought about these failures, and to what degree they were caused by political circumstances that overwhelmed the characters.

All three plays reflect Frayn's interest in 'the epistemology of intention', or the question of how we attempt — and fail — to know our own and others' thoughts and motives. The book reveals that this theme is already latent in his earliest plays. Another, more overt theme that he develops in his work is how we impose our ideas on the world around us.

Because Copenhagen, Democracy and Afterlife all involve real historical figures and situations, Frayn provides substantial 'postscripts' to each one, reprinted in the book, in which he lays out his source material, explains how he used it, and where and why he diverges from the historical record. For Copenhagen, he retraces the tremendous research he did into the physics and the physicists, from concepts of uncertainty and complementarity in quantum mechanics, to calculations of the critical mass of fissile material needed to make an atomic bomb, and the extent and nature of the German atomic weapons programme. His assessments of Bohr and Heisenberg are detailed and perceptive.

Frayn also discusses the 1945 detainment of Heisenberg and other German physicists at Farm Hall, a manor house outside Cambridge, UK, noting that 'the story of Farm Hall is another complete play in itself'. If only he would one day write it.

In a post-postscript, Frayn recounts how Copenhagen took on a life of its own and even changed the historical record, prompting first the revelation of draft letters from Bohr to Heisenberg about their 1941 meeting, and then the discovery of a letter Heisenberg wrote to his wife during that meeting, which took place, it turns out, on three separate days over a week. Although he wishes he had gained access to some of the documents earlier, especially Bohr's draft letters, he maintains that in the end, the play's integrity still stands.

One can see why he is drawn to Chekhov. The Russian, like Frayn, wrote novels and short stories before coming to playwriting late in life, for which he is arguably best known. Frayn's sympathy with Chekhov's 'struggles to understand and master the recalcitrant medium of the theatre' comes through in this fascinating collection: how difficult theatre is, by turns unpredictable, maddening, tedious, enthralling, crushing, exhilarating. In other words, just like science.