The Counter-deception Blog

It is perhaps too soon to proclaim Frayn the Aeschylus of our time, but to me his work suggests the same depth and effect—the essence of the human tragedy set at the center of our social context.

Oh. I just love this headline: A Torn Land of Torn Hearts Lost in a Mist of Deception

November 19, 2004 NYTimes.com
THEATER REVIEW 'DEMOCRACY'
A Torn Land of Torn Hearts Lost in a Mist of Deception
By BEN BRANTLEY

You can start salivating now. After many months of serving the theatrical equivalent of half-thawed TV dinners, Broadway has finally delivered a juicy gourmet's banquet of a play.
Michael Frayn's "Democracy," which opened last night at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, is one of those rare dramas that don't just dare to think big but that fully translate their high aspirations to the stage, with sharp style and thrilling clarity. For New York theatergoers who have endured the recent spate of dutiful revivals and misconceived star vehicles, watching Mr. Frayn's gripping study of the fraught glory years of Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany and the spy who loved him is like riding a wave after dog paddling in shallow waters.
Now the idea of a play about German parliamentary politics may not sound terribly seductive in the weary wake of the recent American presidential elections. Who at this point, you may reasonably ask, would want to sit through a detailed account of campaigning and vote tallying in a foreign country some 30 years ago?
But remember that Mr. Frayn and his long-time collaborator Michael Blakemore, this production's inspired director, are the same men who brought crowd-wowing sex appeal to nuclear physics with the Tony Award-winning "Copenhagen." Aided by a precisely coordinated ensemble of 10 actors, they work a similar magic on the arcana of governing a country made up, as the play puts it, of "11 separate democracies tied up in a federation like ferrets in a bag."
It may take you 15 minutes or so to become oriented to the rules and players on this fragmented political field. But soon enough you're likely to find yourself echoing the sentiments of a government functionary named Günter Guillaume (Richard Thomas), caught up in the surge of tension and relief afforded by an aborted attempt to unseat Brandt (James Naughton), the play's charismatic center. "Never mind football!" he exclaims. "Try parliamentary democracy!"
As with practically everything else in "Democracy," these words assume a multisurfaced shimmer when you consider them in context. The bespectacled, innocuous-seeming Guillaume has, you see, two masters: the Social Democratic Party, which has just come to power in West Germany when the play begins in 1969, and East German intelligence. Guillaume is, on one level, that faithful standby of espionage potboilers - the spy who winds up falling for the very person he is spying on. But nothing about "Democracy" can be tagged with a simple label.
Guillaume, it evolves, suffers from a tendency that also afflicts his employers (on both sides), his colleagues, his countries (East and West) and, as Mr. Frayn has it, democracy itself: he is hopelessly, confoundingly divided. So, of course, is Brandt, in ways that assume the monumental proportions of classic tragedy. As befits a play that zestfully trafficks in parodox, "Democracy" turns out to be a wholehearted study of the mysteries of the divided human heart.
This production arrives in New York under the auspices of the National Theater of Great Britain, which first staged the show in London a year ago. I saw it with its British cast, an impeccable crew led by the magnificent Roger Allam as Brandt, and I was nervous when I heard that American actors would be taking over in New York.
But that was to underestimate the sorcery of Mr. Blakemore and his subtle, sharp-witted design team, which includes Peter J. Davison (sets), Neil Alexander (sound) and especially Mark Henderson (lighting). I'm delighted to report that "Democracy" does indeed still progress with the tense momentum of a closely fought soccer match. And the ensemble is as well oiled and brightly polished as the one in London.
Admittedly, the pivotal roles of Brandt and Guillaume are not as perfectly cast as they were in London. Judging by photographs, Mr. Allam and Conleth Hill, who played Guillaume, looked uncannily like their real-life counterparts. And as the womanizing, mesmerizing, fatally conflicted Brandt, Mr. Allam gave a performance that may never be equaled. His Brandt seemed to have absorbed every camera flash that had stroked his skin, and he appeared both tragically ennobled and trapped by this glittering public surface.
Mr. Naughton, a Tony winner for the musicals "City of Angels" and "Chicago," lacks this apotheosizing presence. His irony is less cosmic than worldly, and his deep, satiny radio announcer's voice automatically attaches distancing quotation marks to many of Brandt's lines. Unlike the shorter, more squat Mr. Hill, who was able to embody the characterization of Guillaume as a greasy meatball, Mr. Thomas cannot help cutting a romantic figure onstage. He waves his feelings as if they were a bright pennant.
Yet despite these deficiencies, Mr. Naughton and Mr. Thomas (and, lest we forget, their ringmaster, Mr. Blakemore) more than hold our interest in the shifting, ambivalent course of their characters' relationship, which ultimately leads to the undoing of both men. Mr. Naughton, who assumes depth as the show goes on, is flawless in embodying the fabled Brandt's wordless public gestures, which, appropriate to a play that celebrates ambiguity, are its most resonant.
And Mr. Thomas ultimately proves himself an invaluable guide to the labyrinthine world onstage. Guillaume is the narrator of "Democracy," relating his experiences not directly to the audience but to his East German controller, Arno Kretschmann (Michael Cumpsty, in superb, smarmy form), who hovers on the periphery of the action. "I'm blind, I'm deaf," Kretschmann tells Guillaume. "You're my eyes, my ears." Mr. Thomas executes this function with an irresistible intensity that captures the probing, perpetually astonished curiosity of the play itself.
For there is no feeling of clinical retrospect about "Democracy." Even though Mr. Frayn is interpolating from a mass of recorded facts, the play always seems to be surprising itself, much as the moody, changeable Brandt is always surprising his colleagues. More than any contemporary dramatist I can think of, Mr. Frayn has a commanding grasp of the overlapping patterns of history and of individual personality. But he is also a virtuoso in suggesting the fluidity of those patterns, at creating the illusion that they are assuming their forms spontaneously as you watch.
Not that "Democracy" is a mimetic slice of life. Its characters speak in a heightened, witty, metaphor-driven language that bears roughly the same relationship to politicians' gossip that Joseph L. Mankiewicz's script for the movie "All About Eve" did to theater chitchat.
Mr. Blakemore matches the playwright's tone of voice with a crisply choreographed and exuberantly, elegantly theatrical production that makes splendid use of Mr. Davison's appropriately two-tiered set. (There is one luscious coup de théâtre that takes the characters from ecstatic election night revelry to a hung-over morning after.)
In practical terms, Mr. Blakemore's greatest achievement may be in sustaining clarity while conveying the prism of points of view described by one of Brandt's aides: "Everyone looking at everyone else. Everyone seeing something different. Everyone trying to guess what everyone else is seeing."
Every member of the supporting cast fulfills his duties with zeal and discipline, from Julian Gamble, as Brandt's damningly observant bodyguard, to Robert Prosky, as a wily, devoutly Christian politician and former Communist. It is clear that none of these characters is to be trusted. Each, in his own way, is duplicitous.
But it is Mr. Frayn's point that everyone, even the most inflexible- seeming among us, is a squirming knot of contradictions. Which is exactly what makes people so worthy of study for this playwright. Brandt's response when he hears that Guillaume may be an enemy agent might be the voice of Mr. Frayn: "The merest possibility that Guillaume is not what he seems makes him infinitely more tolerable."
The miracle of "Democracy" is that it traces this idea of multiplicity on so many equally satisfying levels: within Brandt, who speaks often of the different identities he has assumed throughout his life and agonizes over roads not taken; within every man who works for him; within the mongrel divided nation that was Germany in the early 1970's.
And while you may well draw specific parallels to contemporary figures and events (Bill Clinton as Brandt, anyone?), it's this play's infinite open-endedness that makes it such a treasure. With "Copenhagen" and "Democracy," Mr. Frayn has singlehandedly rejuvenated the biographical drama by making its boundaries porous, so that against the odds it feels as universal as it does particular.
"I am large," says Brandt, quoting Walt Whitman. "I contain multitudes." So, improbably but gloriously, does "Democracy."