Michael Frayn is part of English literature’s elite – but the Surrey-based writer never knows what form his next work will take. Lucy Johnston meets the restless mind behind Noises Off ahead of the radio adaptation of his latest work
On a drizzly winter’s day in peaceful Petersham, I find myself on Michael Frayn’s doorstep, standing on one foot. Flighty with nerves, my brain feels as if the grey matter is gently evaporating. Gone from recollection are the lightly witty greetings I had planned, and I am just beginning to hope that this might all turn out to be a dream, when Michael opens the door.
“Hellooo! Come on in,” says the novelist and playwright, who grew up in Ewell. He extends a long hand on the end of a long arm and, wrinkling his freckled face into a smile, peers down at me from a considerable height with inquisitive grey eyes.
“Now, you’re just in time for a little light lunch. It’s only very simple, I’m afraid. I hope that’s…”
Michael waves a hand in the air as if to dismiss his culinary efforts, then drifts off through the kitchen and into the dining room with me in pursuit. Large windows overlook the lovely garden, while the table is neatly laid with platters and bowls.
“Do make yourself comfortable,” he says, signalling towards the chair in the middle. “I’ll just go and call…”
My host drifts out of the room again. He has drifting in and out of rooms down to a fine art, I think.
When he returns, he is gently ushering his wife, the renowned historical biographer and journalist Claire Tomalin. She is looking gently formidable, in a statement pair of glasses, and has clearly been hard at work in her study. My brain, I note wistfully, has evaporated all over again.
“Oh how nice,” she exclaims, taking the seat on my right. “I do like it when Michael has a guest because he always makes the lunch. I’m usually the one to do it otherwise,” she digs at him, gently. “Either that or I pop up to town and have lunch in a restaurant. I do like to do that, I must say, and it gives Michael a break from me too,” she says with a sparkle.
Her husband smiles quietly on my left, making no comment.
Lunch passes very pleasantly, if rather dauntingly, with talk of a planned Italian holiday, the many books Claire has been reading, their respective talks at Folkestone Book Festival, Dickens’s life in Kent and Claire’s dilemma over whether to accept a speaking engagement in Jaipur.
“It’s rather a challenging trip, isn’t it, what do you think? Should we go?” she asks her husband. At 81 apiece, the couple’s energy for travel is not what it once was, though their cerebral vitality remains conspicuously high.
“Well, I’m not invited, so I don’t…” begins Michael.
“Oh nonsense, I said to Willy [William Dalrymple, the acclaimed writer and historian, to you and me] that I would only go if you could come too, so they will definitely arrange flights for us both.”
Quietly I tackle the cheeseboard. Sandwiched between two of Britain’s biggest literary intellects, listening as they compare diaries across their dining table, I conclude that life will never be this surreal again. The realisation is actually quite calming.
Lunch over, Claire glides back to her study, a “Lovely to see you” drifting back down the stairs, while Michael and I adjourn to the sitting room with coffee. He sinks into a favourite armchair by the fireplace – elbows resting on the arms, fingertips pressed together in thoughtful anticipation. Perched on the sofa opposite, I am struck by the vast number of books – mainly novels – strewn across the coffee table and beyond.
“Oh, I’m not much of a reader myself, I’ve never really got on with it,” reveals Michael, wrinkling at my amazement that someone so accomplished with words could possibly not ‘get on’ with reading.
“Claire is the big reader in the house. She reads fast and can pick out all the detail, whereas I have always read slowly and laboriously, and when I get to the end of a book I close it and can’t remember a damn thing about what happened,” he sighs, his ever-expressive hands making the motion of closing a book, and then flying apart like a magician demonstrating that the rabbit he was holding has disappeared.
A not uncommon trait, I suggest, of the restless mind. He nods appreciatively.
”The thing is, I can read, and I do read, of course, but I just never read that much because I always found it hard. And I had a frightful English teacher at my boarding school in Sutton, who rather put me off early on. Luckily I was saved by another English teacher, when I moved to the wonderful Kingston Grammar School, who was marvellous and introduced me to poetry. That was how I began writing, as a teenager – though what I wrote was awful,” he exclaims, rolling his eyes.
Still, the appetite remained and, after a “disastrous” first attempt at writing a play for Footlights while at Cambridge, he entered journalism, first as a reporter and later – with great success – as a satirical columnist.
However, it is in more recent years that he has become most renowned for his multi-award-winning novels, his much revered translations of Chekhov – he studied Russian during his National Service – and for his equally award-winning plays, most notably the staggeringly successful, excruciatingly funny Noises Off. A runaway hit, the farce has been staged almost constantly, worldwide, since its premiere in 1982.
“I still find the whole thing quite extraordinary, really. To think, I spent years despising the theatre, after my first humiliating failure,” he groans, admitting to having taken great pleasure, as a rather acidic theatre critic, in shredding any show that he saw.
Eventually he was tempted to give playwriting another shot, spurred by a challenge from a director. Five decades later, however, he still seems startled to find himself one of the most awarded and renowned British playwrights alive.
Public popularity ratings place him second only to Alan Bennett – who, it turns out, was a neighbour in Camden, before Michael and Claire moved down to Richmond 12 years ago in search of quieter times, a larger garden for Claire’s green fingers and a house big enough for two studies. It marked a return to Michael’s childhood haunts and an area that he felt Claire would enjoy. The couple are often spotted in the audience at The Rose, and the Kingston theatre has produced two of his plays – Here in 2012 and Donkeys’ Years in 2014.
“I never consciously choose to write a play, or a novel either, for that matter,” says Michael, picking up the thread again, sharp as a needle, as we return from our conversational tangent. “I start with an idea that I want to explore; then, as I write, I just have to let that idea decide what format it will take. It’s the same with characters – you might think you know what you want a character to do or say, but as you write you find you have to make compromises based on what the character actually wants. It’s quite disconcerting!”
Much of Michael’s work has been a restless exploration of how hard it is to know “why people do what they do”. This is what led him to write his most challenging plays, Democracy – about West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and his aide, a communist spy – and Copenhagen, based on a 1941 meeting in the Danish capital between the physicists Heisenberg and Bohr.
But the one thing about which he has avoided writing much is himself. He’ll never write a straight autobiography, he confirms, though he did pen the moving memoir My Father’s Fortune, combining memory with family research. His late father was a successful salesman, despite being almost completely deaf.
“I didn’t do it for self-analysis, but because my children asked me to write down the story of their grandparents – about whom they knew very little.”
It was upsetting, he admits, to revisit certain points in his childhood – such as when his mother died suddenly, of a heart attack, when he was only 12 – but it was also a valuable journey.
“As a child you don’t really look at your parents and analyse them, because you don’t have another set of parents to compare them to. But when you grow up and learn about the world, it brings you some perspective. My father was a really remarkable man to overcome what he did. I have an even greater respect for him now that I understand a bit better what it must have been like for him.”
Talk of his father, and the pride he no doubt felt for Michael, leads us to the topic of Michael’s numerous awards. I scan the room in vain. Does he keep them on show?
“Well yes, they are all in my study,” he says, waving to the ceiling, “though not really for show. I just keep them in sight for those days when I feel like a failure and wonder what I am doing.”
Laughter escapes me. Surely, I think, there can’t ever be days like that for him?
“No, no it’s true,” he insists. “It can strike at the most awkward of moments too. The fear of failure is a powerful force, and I suppose often quite irrational.”
He rubs at his temples thoughtfully with his fingertips, pushing the skin into small folds around his eyes.
“But human nature is a curious thing. We can cling to the most extraordinary threads of hope too, even in the biggest of struggles. Something just keeps us all going.”
He has a theory about the success of plays like Noises Off, which revolve around the familiar human trait of panic.
“I think we all secretly fear situations that take us out of control, and we are often only the smallest step away from that. Watching the worst happen to other people momentarily releases that panic.”
Michael himself seems completely in control. This month sees the first radio instalment of Matchbox Theatre on BBC Radio 4 – an adaptation of his latest book, a series of short plays “to be played out in the mind” rather than on stage, which Claire persuaded him to collect from the piles of paper in his study. Apart from that he is keeping his diary quiet.
“Well, I’m pretty much retired, so I don’t have any more projects planned. Over the years I have found that my best works have also been my biggest struggles, and I don’t think I want to go through another attempt! But I suppose I’ll just have to see if an idea comes along that fascinates me enough.”
His sharp eyes sparkle with a look which suggests that he is not quite done with ideas. But this clever, restless mind has already drifted somewhere else and he’s not letting on what they might be.
The first instalment of Matchbox Theatre – a radio adaptation of Michael Frayn's latest work – is on BBC Radio 4 on November 27
