Democracy: A Play

by Michael Frayn

Overview

A brilliant exploration of character and conscience from the author of COPENHAGEN, set amid the tensions of 1960s Berlin

In Democracy, Michael Frayn once again creates out of the known events of twentieth-century history a drama of extraordinary urgency and subtlety, reimagining the interactions and motivations of Willy Brandt as he became chancellor of West Germany in 1966 and those of his political circle, including Günter Guillaume, a functionary who became Brandt's personal assistant-and who was eventually exposed as an East German spy in a discovery that helped force Brandt from office. But what circumstances allowed Brandt to become the first left-wing chancellor in forty years? And why, given his progressive policies, did the East German secret police feel it necessary to plant a spy in his office and risk bringing down his government?
Michael Frayn writes in his postscript to the play, "Complexity is what the play is about: the complexity of human arrangements and of human beings themselves, and the difficulties that this creates in both shaping and understanding our actions."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466829428
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/15/2004
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	205 KB

About the Author

Michael Frayn has been a newspaper reporter as well as a novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and translator. Among his most acclaimed works are the novel Headlong and the play Noises Off. He lives in London.

Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. He has written seventeen plays, including Noises Off, Copenhagen, and Democracy, translated Chekhov's last four plays, and adapted his first as Wild Honey. His screenplays include Clockwise, starring John Cleese, and among his eleven novels are The Tin Men, Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong, Spies, and Skios. Collections of articles include Collected Columns, Stage Directions, and Travels with a Typewriter. He has also published two philosophical works, Constructions and The Human Touch, and a memoir, My Father's Fortune. His most recent publications are three collections of short entertainments, Matchbox Theatre, Pocket Playhouse, and Magic Mobile. He is married to the writer Claire Tomalin.

Editorial Reviews

The most intelligent and gripping new English drama since Frayn's last stage outing with Copenhagen. A first-rate spy story and . . . a piece of rare ambition.” —Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph

“Anyone who mourns the disappearance of leaders with real civility and magnetism—or of topical dramas with the same attributes—will be buoyed by [this] extraordinary play . . . Democracy is not another game of Cold War cat-and-mouse. It's really a play about loyalty, one that, in a satisfying way, ends up testing ours.” —Peter Marks, The Washington Post

“[Democracy] achieves something close to impossible. It fascinates you with the ins and outs, ups and downs, of German politics: not in the Hitler era, not in the chaos of the 1920s, but in the supposedly boring 1970s.” —Benedict Nightingale, The New York Times

From the Publisher