Word: frayne
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...time when playwrights like Stoppard, Hare and Michael Frayn are wrestling with weighty topical issues, Ayckbourn admits to having little interest in politics: "I've lived through enough times to know, as the French say, plus ça change - nothing changes, give or take the odd Iraqi war." One thing that musters his outrage, though, is the dwindling government funding for the arts, which has endangered local theaters like his Scarborough company - where, in all his years as artistic director, he has never taken a salary. "My salary is in the accounts," he says, "but it usually goes flying...
...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...
...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...
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...