Tugging at the Old School Ties

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Britain's most versatile man of letters was once the fledgling rebel with a cause. When Michael Frayn was a schoolboy in the late 1940s, he and a friend "discovered the revolutionary tradition. We ran an unofficial Marxist cell, and I described myself as a Communist." Frayn's widowed father, an asbestos salesman and orthodox Laborite, was not amused. He declared that higher education was rubbish and that Michael should leave school to become a sales trainee. The son, more mole than firebrand, slowly undermined that plan and found his way to Cambridge, first as an army recruit sent to learn Russian, then as a full-time student. There he discovered, and was seduced by, the very class of society that Marxism had taught him to hate: socially adept, physically graceful and intellectually poised aristocrats. Recalls Frayn: "I was immensely charmed by their sense of style, maybe a little overimpressed by their coolness and insouciance. I did not think I could become one, but they fascinated me."

Those Cambridge encounters further propelled Frayn away from asbestos sales and into an exemplary career as journalist, novelist and playwright. While still an undergraduate, he contributed to the premier humor magazine Punch. Straight out of school, he wrote news and columns for the Manchester Guardian and then the Observer. Turning to fiction, he produced five deft, whimsical novels centered on class conflicts and old school ties. In the past decade he has emerged as one of Britain's leading playwrights. His glimpse of backstage pandemonium, Noises Off, was a Broadway hit two seasons ago. Seven earlier scripts have been produced, most of them in London and by companies in Seattle, Dallas, Washington and New Haven. His dark comedy Benefactors is the Broadway season's most acclaimed play. Wild Honey, Frayn's bold adaptation of the young Anton Chekhov's Platonov, packed the house at London's National Theater and is due in the U.S. this fall. And in March, Frayn's first film, a rueful comedy called Clockwise, opens in Lon don. Typical of Frayn, who has "always adored farce," his plot revolves around a social-climbing headmaster (John Cleese) who misses a train and frantically tries to catch up.

The articulate and urbane author, now 52, long ago caught up in style with the blue bloods he admired in his youth. But he has often been beset by doubt. For years after the flop of his Cambridge Footlights revue, he belittled the theater as an art form. His turn to the stage, abandoning a novel halfway through, was an act of desperation. "I lost faith in my own voice, and I liked the stage because the characters do all the talking for you." The shift brought criticism: "I was very conscious of the disapproval of friends and reviewers who felt I was taking a rather sharp step downward." Since then, however, playwriting has won Frayn a wider following and much more money than his earlier ventures: Noises Off has been running for four years in London, and Steven Spielberg paid producers a reported $1 million plus for the screen rights, an act Frayn regards as folly. "I was asked if I would write the screenplay," he recalls, "and said I would be delighted if I had the faintest idea how it could be done as a film, but I don't. As far as I know, nothing has happened with the project since."

One traditional measure of a superior play is that it can sustain widely varying interpretations. Benefactors meets that test. Nearly every critic has lavished praise on the work; each has found his own version of the script's meaning. Some saw it as portraying the death of liberalism, others as a comment on the unworkability of democracy. In London, it was widely viewed as a social satire about the professional classes: its self-deluding hero, an architect planning high-rise public housing, seeks to tear down as unlivable a neighborhood of row houses very much like his own. The play's structure--overlapping reminiscences and flashbacks--suggests the unattainability of objective truth and the aching burden of memory. Frayn does not fault the re viewers. "I know the play rather well," he says, "yet I found it very difficult to give a brief description for a collection of my work."

Critics who saw both have generally preferred the London production, but Frayn seems to favor the Broadway rendition, starring Sam Waterston as the architect and Glenn Close as his wife. "This version brings out more strongly the feelings and relationships of the characters," Frayn notes, "and also the narrative. That has something to do with the audience. Americans seem much more amused by the twists and turns of the plot." This emphasis on emotion marks a deliberate departure from Frayn's customarily wry, bemused tone. He explains, "All humorous writing is detached. What makes it comic is a refusal to be involved with the feelings of the characters. There is rather less of that approach in Benefactors."

Benefactors sharpens its bite on the two marriages it portrays: one disintegrates, the other survives but lapses into isolation and cynicism. Frayn's novels, notably Sweet Dreams and Towards the End of the Morning, also evoke the slow decay of marriage and depict children as noisy housewreckers. His own marriage effectively ended with a separation five years ago; his frequent companion, as British newspapers phrase it, is Claire Tomalin, literary editor of the London Sunday Times. Frayn says he remains close to his daughters, one a novice BBC staffer, another a would-be journalist, the third applying to universities. He admits that his sour descriptions of beleaguered parenthood and the "squalor of middle-class domestic life" derive from memory. But he adds, in a line echoing the sensibility of Benefactors and his other work so aptly that it might be his literary credo, "One always has great nostalgia for experiences that were emotionally intense, even if one had mixed feelings about them at the time." --By William A. Henry III