Two weeks ago,
playwright Michael Frayn was given a special Olivier award for a body
of dramatic work which over the last forty years has quietly become
an essential part of Britain's artistic fabric. This week, a touring
production of his 1982 farce par excellence, Noises Off, that
originated at the Old Vic, is playing in Aberdeen prior to dates in
Glasgow and Edinburgh. Frayn himself has been on the literary
festival circuit, giving readings to coincide with the publication of
his most recent novel, Skios.
All of these events in
different ways go some way to illustrating Frayn's relationship with
public life, be it at an awards ceremony in a room full of high-class
thespians, entertaining literary groupies, or, in Noises Off,
lampooning the world he is both part of and outside with an
astonishing theatrical skill which has made it one of the most
popular plays in the world.
Noises Off is set in
the the world of low-rent touring theatre in which a badly penned
farce is being performed by a cast of trouser-dropping ex TV stars on
the way down and scantily-clad wannabe starlets believing they're
very much on the way up. The trick here is that while the first act
focuses on the play's shambolic dress rehearsal, the second is set a
month later, with the same act being performed, only viewed from the
increasingly calamitous backstage area, where tensions between the
company are running high. The final act sees the same act performed
yet again, only towards the end of the tour, with all the accrued
fall-outs and disasters riotously in evidence in a hilarious case of
life imitating art imitating life.
With this tour
featuring former star of Drop the Dead Donkey Neal Pearson alongside
a cast that includes Scotland's Maureen Beattie, there should be
slickness guaranteed. Even after thirty years, however, while he's
happy to leave the cast and director Lindsay Posner to their own
devices, Frayn still gives a pep talk on the first day of rehearsals.
“I always give a
speech about health and safety,” he says, “because lots of actors
hurt themselves doing this play, and in a way the play is quite
unfair on actors, because it's such a grotesque portrayal of them. In
actual fact, actors are all about collaboration and helping each
other out. I know that's not what a lot of people think of them, but
in general I really think actors are fantastically creative people.”
The roots of Noises Off
date back to Frayn's first ever professional work in 1970, when four
one-act plays for two actors were performed by Lynn Redgrave and
Richard Briers under the umbrella title of The Two of Us.
“One of the plays was
a farce,” he recalls, “and because farce is all about finding
people in compromising positions, you need more than two characters
in it. Lynn and Richard played five characters between them, and one
night I was watching from backstage, and became fascinated watching
them come offstage for all these quick changes. That was when I
thought it would be interesting to do a farce from behind.”
An early oner-act
version, Exits, was performed in 1977, but it was another five years
before the full-length Noises Off went into production. Since then,
Frayn has tweaked the script several times, although he remains
cautious about overplaying his hand.
“Whenever you make a
change in one section, it changes something in all the others,” he
says. “It's like trying to make a statue out of jelly.”
Nowhere was this more
evident than during rehearsals for the play's very first production
at the Lyric, Hammersmith, when director Michael Blakemore told Frayn
he'd do the best he could, but he didn't know if it would work.
“Every day at
rehearsals his face got greyer and greyer,” Frayn remembers.
The first night went
well, and on the second the cast realised they had a hit on their
hands when when the curtain was held because the queue for tickets
was so large. Blakemore's production ran with five successive casts,
and the play went on to win a Tony award on Broadway.
“When it was first
done, people said it would be alright to do it in England, because
we're used to English sex farce,” says Frayn, “but nowhere else
has that , so we wouldn't be able to tour it anywhere else. I think
now it's been done all over the world.”
How these productions
have fared won't have been helped by recent discoveries found in the
play's published text.
“When Lindsay Posner
started working on it, we realised there were a few mistakes in the
published text,” Frayn says. “At one point it says that somebody
exits to the bedroom, and then when they come back on it says they
enter from the bathroom. What directors working on the play around
the world made of that I don't know.”
In 1992, Noises Off was
made into a film by veteran Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovitch.
While the likes of Michael Caine, Denholm Elliot and Marilu Henner
made a decent fist of things, and while Frayn clearly retains a
fondness for it, it never quite captured the brio of the stage
version.
“I think they made a
good job of it,” Frayn says, “but it's an inherently theatrical
piece, and you have to feel some sense of that danger that exists
with farce, where you feel things might ho wrong. On film, you know
nothing can ho wrong, so that slightly takes the edge of things.”
Of his other recent
activities, Frayn sounds wonderfully amused by the experiences.
Concerning his book festival tour, he notes that “There are an
astonishing number of these events. How can the country possibly
support so many literary festivals? They seem to be the only part of
the economy that does well.”
As for his Olivier
award, “If you can manage to stay alive, then you're going to get
one eventually,” Frayn dryly notes.
One thing that has
stood out with Frayn's work is how different it all is. From Noise
Off, he went into writing a series of translations of Chekhov's
plays. Arguably Frayn's other best known play is 1998's Copenhagen,
which imagined what might have happened at a meeting in 1941 between
physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and the ramifications on
the Second World War in terms of the atomic bomb. Yet, despite their
differences, all three deal with wildly complex plot structures to
make their point.
“The only advice I
can give to a younger writer is to keep on repeating themselves,”
the seventy-nine year old says with more than a hint of mischief.
“Change the name, and make it slightly different, but basically you
should keep writing the same thing. Why shouldn't audiences want
something predictable? It's like cornflakes. If you but a box of
cornflakes, it's because you like cornflakes, and because you don't
want anything different. It's much easier to do that.
“Unfortunately,” he
says, “I've never been able to do that. The only way I can write
things is to wait for an idea to form and then write it down, and it
seems that all my ideas come out different.”
Noises Off, His
Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen until Saturday; Kings Theatre, Glasgow,
May 27-June1; Kings Theatre, Edinburgh, June 4-8.
Michael Frayn – A
Literary Life
1962-67 - Michael Frayn
spent his early adulthood working as a reporter on the Guardian and
the Observer. The best of his articles were reprinted in four
volumes, beginning with The Day of the Dog in 1962.
1965 – Frayn's first
novel, the Tin Men, wins the Somerset Maugham Award.
1970 – The Two of Us,
four plays for two actors, announces Frayn's arrival as a dramatist.
1977 – Two plays,
Alphabetical Orders and Donkey Years, both win best comedy awards.
1982 – Noises Off
premieres.
1983 – Frayn
translates Three Sisters, the first of several Chekhov translations.
1998 – Copenhagen,
which imagines a real life meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and
Werner Heisenberg in 1941 wins four best play awards.
2003 – Democracy, a
play based on the real life events concerning West German chancellor
Willy Brandt's decision to expose his secretary, Gunter Guillaume, as
a Communist spy, opens.
2008 – Frayn's most
recent play, Afterlife, about Austrian theatre director Max
Reinhardt, premieres at the National Theatre. In the same year as his
twenty-ninth play appears, , a book of Frayn's writings on theatre
and introductions to his plays, Stage Directions, is published.
The Herald, May 9th 2013
ends
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