Michael Frayn

0:06Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures reveal the influences and experiences that most inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the author Michael Frayn. Over a seven-decade career, Frayn has been acclaimed as a novelist, a playwright, a journalist, translator and memoirist. From his comedies, including the stage farce Noises Off, a screenplay for Clockwise starring John Cleese, and the novels Headlong and Skios, to the complex political, historical and scientific themes of his stage plays Democracy and Copenhagen, he's been prolific in a diverse array of genres and subjects.

0:46He's also renowned for his stage adaptations of Russian classics, including several works by Anton Chekhov. At 92, Michael Frayn advised on a recent revival of Copenhagen at the Hampstead Theatre. Michael Frayn, welcome to This Cultural Life. Or I should say, thank you for welcoming us into your home. Well, thank you very much for coming here. I'm really interested, Michael, looking around your library, looking at the shelves. Just as there are so many facets to your writing, so many different themes, they seem to be ordered by theme on the shelves. So there's nuclear physics down here. There's lots of travel.

1:21There's a philosophy section clearly up there, isn't there? Yes, and there's a Cyrillic section here. What about at home as a child? Can you remember books at home? We had the complete works of Shakespeare, which I think my father must have won in a competition or something, but he didn't throw in much books. That was about it. Really? I wish I could remember any other books. No, I had quite a lot of books, but I don't think my parents did. You were born in 1933. 1933. What are your earliest memories of home life, family life? Well, we lived in the suburbs in Ewell, which is not all that far from here, the other side of Kingston.

2:01My father was a rep for a firm that made asbestos building components. And he always said he thought he could get me into the firm to train as a rep. I would have been the worst rep in the world. Also, it turns out that the asbestos industry was a rather less secure form of living, even than literature. Did you have asbestos in the house? Did you bring samples home? Yes, he used to bring samples home, and I used to saw them up and fill the air with asbestos dust. And about 15 years ago, my sister got a mesothelioma, which is the cancer of the lung lining, specifically associated with asbestos.

2:46and the only asbestos she could remember being exposed to was the stuff that I was throwing up in the garden. That's terrible. And it comes on often very, very late, often after 20, even 30 years. In your 2010 memoir, which was called My Father's Fortune, you explored your family backstory and it also recalls the tragedy of your mother's death when I think you were 12 years old. She died very suddenly, didn't she? Yes. What do you remember of that day? I just remember we were all about to go out to a party to celebrate either fireworks night or VJ Day, I can't remember which hour. And she was walking across a room downstairs and she had a heart attack and dropped dead halfway across the room.

3:35And I just remember my grandmother who lived with us running upstairs calling for my father. And I knew from the way she was shouting something awful that happened.

3:48And after a few years, very grey years after she died, life began to improve. And at a time when a lot of teenagers' lives were getting worse, mine was getting better.

4:09On This Cultural Life, Michael Frayne, my guests choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity and the first choice on the list that you sent us is arthur ransome author of the swallows and amazon series so when did you first read him and and those stories oh probably eight or nine and i read them all over and over again i was actually obsessed with them and when i was about probably about 12, I decided I would write a novel myself about children who went sailing in dinghies in the Lake District, in spite of the fact that I'd never been to the Lake District, never sailed in a dinghy, never even seen a dinghy.

4:51So it was all pure cultural influence from Arthur Ransom. Inspiration or plagiarism? But I've never been writing stuff ever since I could write sketches for my puppets and for my sister and myself do at Christmas. Puppets. You had puppets as a child. Yes, because my friend David, who was clever with his hands, built a beautiful puppet theatre for himself. So I had to build a puppet theatre. I had no skill in my hands and my puppets couldn't stand up. They fell down all the time. It's also very difficult to keep puppets on their feet. If you're reading the text of your play behind the screen, they tend to float.

5:28And who's written the script? You? Of course, yes. Of course, so your first plays. My first plays, yes. So did you know as a child that writing was the future for you, do you think? Yes, I sort of knew that what I wanted was to be a writer. My father was an influence as well because I remember I wrote an essay on the house I would like to live in one day. My father read it and he was not much given to encouragement. It wasn't the way then. But he said, it's very good, maybe you ought to be a journalist. And maybe that's what put the seed in my head. So I also wanted to be a writer, but I also did want to be a journalist.

6:08In your notes, you also mentioned a teacher at school called Mr Brady. Mr Brady, yes. It was a particular encouragement. Well, I had a rather bad patch after my mother died. I had to move schools and move from class to class. It started by being more or less top of the class. and rapidly sank to being bottom of the class and everything because I discovered I could get the approval of my classmates by mocking the teachers, which was probably quite a good professional training, as it turned out in life, but with very bad effects at the time. But we had one teacher, Mr Brady, who taught us English.

6:48He didn't really teach his English. He taught us in the periods marked English on the timetable. and he used to mark my essays, all 30 out of 30, and read them out to the class. I was tremendously cheered by this, very encouraged. So, of course, I worked very hard at pleasing him, writing the essays. And one day, when I was about 15, I think, he read us Shelley's Ode to a Skylark. And I, I think the whole class, actually, were absolutely enraptured by it. I'd never heard anything so beautiful in my life. It was just wonderful that the world suddenly seemed a much wider, more amazing place than I'd realised.

7:30In the golden lightning of the sunken sun, or which clouds are brightening, thou dost float and run like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. The pale purple even melts around thy flight. Like a star of heaven in the broad daylight, thou art unseen. But yet I hear thy shrill delight. keen as are the arrows of that silver sea. That set me off writing poetry. And the friend I made at school, who was called Michael Lane, we were Michael Frame, Michael Lane, no one can tell us apart. We were very close friends. We discovered music and literature together. Between us, we wrote enough poetry to fill the Oxford collection of English verse.

8:12Was it good? No.

8:16No, they were terrible poems. In your 2002 novel Spies, your elderly protagonist looks back on childhood events in which he and a friend become convinced that the friend's mother is a spy. The book's very much about the imagination and the uncertainty of memory. So how much did it owe to your own uncertain memories of childhood? Well, it starts off with a very clear memory. The two central characters, the little boys, are very much based on myself and my closest friend at the time. and he was the leader in all our games. And what I remember clearly is his saying at some point, out of the blue, my mother was a German spy.

8:59And it was obviously the start of another game. And I think we followed his mother around for an hour or two and she didn't get in touch with the German high command or steal any plans for secret aircraft or whatever. And we got bored and gave up. But I just started to think, what would have happened if we'd been a bit more persistent and we followed around? What would we have made of an adult life? Particularly if there turned out to be some sort of discrepancies in it, as there is in most people's lives. That afternoon, when Keith's mother has retired for her rest, we enter the sitting room and glide silently across to the desk.

9:40Keith bends down and peers at the blotter through the magnifying glass from his stamp collecting kit. I think I can make out a few odd letters, and perhaps even one or two syllables. Thurs, possibly. And if you could, whispers Keith. Those two central characters are based on memories, and my friend's parents are very much based on my friend's real parents. A funny thing occurred towards the end of writing the novel. It occurred to me that if I was still alive, my friend might still be alive, and he might not like the picture I painted of his parents. So I tried to get in touch with him. I couldn't find him anywhere.

10:27But before I finished the book, out of the blue, I got a letter saying, you won't remember me, but we used to play games together when we were children, and we had a camp in a hedge from where we fought the Third Reich. In case I still didn't remember who he was, and of course I did, he said at the bottom, the one with the terrible father. So of course I had to get in touch with him and tell him that I was writing this book and when I finished I showed it to him. I don't know what I'd have done. If he'd said, I really find this very offensive and I'm very hurt by what you've said about my father...

11:10We should just explain, the father in the book is incredibly controlling and the friend's mother is clearly living in fear of him. Yes, absolutely. So that was based on real events. It was a brutal twist, his son. What would I have done? Would I have put it on the shelf and forgotten about it or would I have persisted? Anyway, he was very generous about it. He very much liked it. and what he particularly liked was the picture of his father and his father, he said, had simply ruined his life by his coldness and cruelty. What an amazing coincidence that he found you while you were still writing the book.

11:46Yes. Well, as he said, I've been thinking about the past and I've been thinking about the past and he said, I think it's called old age.

12:03Your next choice, Michael Frayne, is learning Russian. In the early 1950s, you did national service and you joined the Army Intelligence Corps and were selected to learn Russian at Cambridge University. So were you being trained to become a spy? I wanted to... I tried to teach myself Russian at school because my friend and I were the sort of private branch of the Communist Party and I knew everything was wonderful in Russia and I wanted to know more about Russia. I didn't get very far with teaching myself Russian but when I did National Service, I discovered that there were various courses for translators and interpreters.

12:44So I applied for them. And in the middle of basic training, another man and I were sent for by the personnel selection officer. I was rather tall. He was very short. We stood there in our very scruffy work denims and the personnel selection officer said, I see you've both applied for the Russian course. I suppose you think this is a skive. Well, I can tell you that if you learn Russian, you may be dropped behind Russian lines at any point. So we said, yes, I understand, sir. And off we went to learn Russian. Well, in fact, our Russian never got good enough to be passed. I read that Alan Bennett was also on that same course.

13:24He was on the same course, yes, yes, yes. And we were friends. film. Really? You can't imagine Alan Bennett being a sort of trained for espionage? We weren't really being trained for espionage. It was the time of the Berlin Air left, and it seems as if there might be a war with Russia. People realised that the only people who spoke Russian in the country were ex-Russian nationals. And there's always, of course, a question mark over their loyalty, as seen by the authorities. Yes. So they hastily began these schemes to teach linguists in order to interrogate prisoners, to listen to enemy broadcasts, read enemy propaganda and so on.

14:05And that's what we were really being trained for, interrogating prisoners. One of your many literary achievements is to have become a preeminent translator of the work of Anton Chekhov, including all of the late plays, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard. To what extent can that love of Chekhov be traced back to learning Russian, do you think? Certainly to learning Russian and reading Chekhov. But I started translating him because the National Theatre asked me to translate Goldoni. And I said, I don't think I'd do it because I really seriously know any Italian. And the dramaturg at the National Theatre said, oh, good heavens, you don't need to know Italian to translate Goldone.

14:52We just go out and buy some standard translations and you take them home and you lash them together into your own version. So I was really eager to be produced at the National Theatre, so I took a lot of the Goldone translations home and read them. But I couldn't feel what the original was like through these different versions. So I said, why don't you ask me to translate from a language I do know, Russian? I don't think the dramaturg had ever thought of that before. He was rather stuck by the idea. So that's how it began. How are your versions different from many of the others that had gone before?

15:29Well, everyone translates Chekhov. I'm sure you've translated Chekhov. No, there can't be many citizens left, and you haven't, because everyone knows what Chekhov said in his plays, and you don't need to look at the original. But I think sometimes, if you look at the original text, you get a bit of a surprise. It's not quite as you've supposed from all the versions you've seen. You said that your translations of Chekhov, your versions are more direct, they're more conversational, they're possibly funnier than a lot of other adaptations of Chekhov. Do you recognise that? I think for years people didn't realise that Chekhov was a funny writer.

16:08And all the early translations of Chekhov were just sort of strange and about these remote, weird people who had a completely different view of life from us. And it's not really like that. Chekhov was a comic writer long before he was a playwright. And he wrote an enormous amount of comic stuff. And there's always comedy in his things, however serious. And his characters are not really all that different from middle-class English people. A lot of what people thought was strange was the kind of self-deprecating humour that English middle class people use to protect themselves, and so do Russians.

16:53Michael Frayn:Are you serious about her? I call on her nearly every day. I make conversation, I endure the boredom, I put her mother to some expense in coffee, and there we are. Quite what draws me back each time. Whether it's love or whether it's boredom, I don't really know. All I know is that I miss her quite painfully after lunch sometimes. So it's love then. I'm just going to wrap up this thought about Chekhov by throwing a quote back at you from your fellow Russian translator, Alan Bennett, who once said that Michael Frayn is the man who drew the cheque from Chekhov.

17:37Fair enough? Rather smaller checks than you get from writing your own works. Rather smaller checks than Alan has got from writing his own works.

17:53Your next choice, Michael Frayne, is Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, his 1938 satirical novel about newspaper journalism, which you say is the funniest book ever written. So when did you first read it? I suppose when I was in late teenage, I've read it several times again since. I think it's the funniest book I've ever written. Maybe there are funnier ones, but I haven't come across them. Lord Copper was at his desk. Come in, Mr Boot. This is a great pleasure. I wanted to meet you for a long time. You may sit down too, Salter. Is Mr Boot all set for his trip? Up to a point, Lord Copper. Excellent. Remember, the Patriots are in the right and are going to win.

18:41The Beast stands by them four square, but they must win quickly. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side and a colourful entry into the capital. That is the Beast policy for the war. So this is well before your time as a newspaper journalist working for the Manchester Guardian and then the Observer. Yes. How familiar was Fleet Street, the atmosphere of the place, the working day, the sort of characters that you met there? How familiar was that, having read Scoop? Well, in Scoop, the characters are working for a version of the Daily Express, going out to cover the war in Ethiopia.

19:19I have to say that reporting, serious reporting, is some of the hardest writing I've ever done. Actually describing the world that's in front of your eyes is very difficult. It's harder than fiction. In fiction, the thing falls into place in your head. If a story is working, everything seems to fall into place and the characters seem to invent themselves. If you go out and look at real people and real situations, you're constrained by what you see. And getting what you see into words is extraordinarily difficult. and journalists who can really do it are remarkably talented. You wrote your own Fleet Street comic novel towards the end of the morning in 1967, so you were still working at The Observer then when you wrote that book.

20:12Yes, I was, yes. Did colleagues recognise fictionalised versions of themselves? The central character towards the end of the morning was a man called John Dyson and he was very closely based on the leader page editor of the Observer who handled my copy. I was very fond of him. He was a rather extravagant man, extravagant in his praise and extravagant in his views of the world. People would say things like, oh, Michael, you write like a darling. Anyway, I was fairly free in borrowing a lot of his characteristics for the book. Congratulations, everyone, the Observer read it and they all came up to me one by one.

20:55They said, is that supposed to be... I don't know what his real name was now, or was just a bit of a fictitious character. And did he know himself? Did he know himself? Never mentioned it. And he was the kind of man who could never keep anything to himself. If he'd thought of it, he would have burst out at once. And he never said anything about that. And then finally, about ten years after the book came out, as we walked back to the office. He said, Michael, I know. There's something we need to ask you. Somebody told me that you based a character on me. I thought, oh, well, I'll just have to...

21:36I've thrown up. And he said, but I saw that play and the character was nothing like me at all. And you've got the wrong character. Wrong work, wrong genre. Throughout your writing career, there has been not only a huge range of writing genres and themes, but the tone as well, from the very serious, the scientific and the political works, to the deeply farcical. Let's talk for a moment about your most famous comedy, Noises Off. Inspired by watching the very first play that you wrote, The Two of Us, watching it from backstage in a theatre, so how did that experience inspire Noises Off? Well, my first play was in fact four short plays, and one of them was a farce, because I adored farce.

22:22and it wasn't terribly good. None of the plays were terribly good. And one night, I can't remember why now, I went and watched it backstage and saw the characters running desperately from one door to another, doing quick changes as they went, and I thought, this is funnier than what's going on around the front. And it turned out to be a very easy thought to think, but an extremely difficult thing to do. And I wrote many, many, many drafts and attempts at it before I had a workable version. Even then, I didn't think anyone would ever perform it. It's been performed all around the world ever since.

23:01It's gone everywhere, yes.

23:02Michael Frayn:This is such a nice company to work with. It's such a happy company. Wait till we get to Broadway in six months. If. Wait till we get to Cleveland in three months. Lloyd, my darling, are you all right? I'm starting to know what God felt like when he sat out there in the darkness creating the world. And what did he feel like, Lloyd, my dear? Very pleased he'd taken his Valium. The first play that you mentioned, The Two of Us, in 1970, I'm not sure if it was a massive success initially, but then it went on to become acclaimed, didn't it? And now, of course, you are regarded as one of our greatest living playwrights.

23:33But in the notes that you sent us, you said, I despised theatre when I was younger. Why? And what changed? Well, when I was at Cambridge, I wrote the Footlights Review, the annual review. and every year we did the Footlights review in Cambridge for a month, I think, and then it was done for a few weeks in the West End and we were all very ambitious and it was a good chance to get your plays or your sketches, your writing or your performances seen by professional agents and producers. The Footlights that I wrote was the first one that didn't go to the West End. It didn't go to the West End because it wasn't very funny.

24:16And I'm afraid, like the fox and the grapes in The Legend, I turned against the theatre and decided that theatre was ridiculous and was just full of people who are going to forget their lines or drop their props and be embarrassing one way or another. Because you've been personally slighted then. Because I've been personally slighted. I'm afraid it was a shameful reaction. Like Evelyn War's Scoop, one of your later novels, Schios also uses a mistaken identity device for comic effect. What's the difference between writing a farce for the stage and writing a farce for the page? Yes, well, Schios is a bit of an experiment to see whether you could do a farce for the page because one of the things that makes farce possible in the theatre is that you have an audience, a live audience, and if you can get them laughing, they set each other off.