Playbill - 30/08/2003 - Robert Simonson

Frayn and Blakemore Reunite for London Democracy

Michael Frayn's latest play, Democracy, begins previews at the National Theatre Aug. 30 with an official opening set for Sept. 9. Directing is his Copenhagen colleague Michael Blakemore.

Both Blakemore and Frayn won Tony Awards when Copenhagen played on Broadway in 2000. Copenhagen was based on a real life 1941 meeting two world famous physicists, one Danish and one German. Frayn again draws on European history for his new play. Democracy is set in West Germany in 1969, with Chancellor (the German term for Prime Minister) Willy Brandt taking office, little realizing that his personal assistant is spying on him for the East German Secret Service.

The play stars Roger Allam and Conleth Hill. It will be performed in the Royal National Theatre's Cottesloe Theatre. Copenhagen also started life at the National.

Roger Allam co-starred at the National as Adolf Hitler in Speer, and also appeared in The Cherry Orchard, Summerfolk, Money and Troilus and Cressida.

All told, Michael Blakemore has directed seven of Frayn's plays. Frayn's most famous play is arguable Noises Off, which recently has a revival on Broadway.

The London Theatre Guide - 02/09/2003 - Alan Bird

Michael Frayn’s new play Democracy, directed by Michael Blakemore, tells the story of Willy Brandt and of his personal assistant Günter Guillaume. In the programme notes Frayn tells us that the play is a fictional account of a non-fictional historical record. Yet, despite Frayn calling his play fiction, it seems to me that it is more fact than fiction. He tells us that the biographies of the protagonists are true to the record and the political events the play refers to did happen.

The play begins with the appointment of Willy Brandt after the Bundestag had elected him Chancellor in 1969, the first centre-left Chancellor of the German Democratic Republic, and ends with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Brandt, we are constantly reminded throughout the play, had “Clean Hands” in that he had no part to play during Hitler’s Third Reich, having spent that dreadful period in Germany’s history as an exile in Norway from 1933. Even his name Willy Brandt (an assumed name he used in his youth when he was involved in resisting the Nazi Party), was a constant reminder that he had no part in those events. He returned to Germany after the war and participated in the reconstruction of the country, and as Chancellor he signed the “Moscow Agreement”, in which ‘East Germany’ and ‘West Germany’ recognised each other’s existence and borders, and in 1974 both East and West Germany joined the United Nations.

In the play we see the inner workings of Willy Brandt’s government. Brandt was idolised by many in the German republic, his message of reconciliation, compassion and peace being warmly welcomed. However, his own personal life and relations with his closest advises was more complex and at times troubling, especially his relationship with his personal assistant, Günter Guillaume, who spied for East Germany throughout.

Guillaume’s servile nature makes him almost invisible within the workings of Brandt’s administration as he slowly gains the confidence of Brandt. He greatly admires Brandt and also appears to be motivated by the same desire for reconciliation between East and West that labours so heavily upon Brandt’s heart.

The play is in many ways fascinating, the relationship between Brandt, Guillaume and the other members of the government are very human and believable, However, when Guillaume is exposed as a spy and Brandt is finally forced to resign it seems more like an internal scandal within his government, rather than something that could have threatened the peace and stability of Germany, a peace and stability that Brandt had so carefully constructed. The production lacks the crisis and alarm that surely would have followed such a shocking revelation, and whilst the characters are engaging, the dramatic saga of the event is missing.

Peter J Davison’s set design is of Brandt’s stark and rather barren office in Bonn. A white metal spiral staircase connects the two floors of this split-level stage design, with Brandt’s office on the upper level. The walls behind the three desks on the lower level are full of shelves stacked with files, which are put to use at the end of the play!!

There are three excellent performances. Conleth Hill is a sycophantic Guillaume, who despite this trait manages also to be warm and convivial - one sympathises as much for the spy as one does for the Chancellor he unwittingly brings down. Roger Allam brings an almost messianic flavour to his portrayal of Brandt but also captures the dejection that Brandt often struggled with. Whist David Ryall’s Herbert Wehner is an impressive shrewd elder statesman.

Miami Herald, FL - 11/09/2003 - Matt Wolf

German History Presented on London Stage

LONDON - The ins and outs of coalition politics in a divided Germany some 30 or more years ago might not sound like the most thrilling theatrical recipe.

But trust English dramatist Michael Frayn to put a human face on history. Democracy, his 14th and latest play, chronicles four fateful years in the life and career of German chancellor Willy Brandt without once becoming a conventional bioplay.

Instead, Brandt's relationship with his most trusted aide, Günter Guillaume, who turned out to be a spy, works on numerous levels, not least as a stinging, suspenseful thriller.

The result is a play easily surpassing Frayn's previous, Tony-winning Copenhagen in sheer theatricality and outright juice. And with the assist of Frayn's longtime director, Michael Blakemore, Democracy gets the production it deserves during its repertory engagement at the National Theater's smallish Cottesloe auditorium.

The play, which opened Tuesday and runs through Dec. 30, will be a surefire transfer to the West End and possibly Broadway.

Copenhagen got copious mileage from the sheer import of its topic: an imagining of the time spent between two physicists, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, who came together in the Danish capital in 1941 to discuss the atomic bomb.

Democracy, by contrast, has less apocalyptic concerns but makes for a much more animated play. In charting the ever-changing rapport between the leftist Brandt and his East German-born aide-de-camp (and Stasi spy) Guillaume, Frayn places a country split in half in the very human context of two men who also are torn.

No wonder Roger Allam's Brandt quotes the famous line from American poet Walt Whitman, "I contain multitudes." Brandt does, and so does Irish actor Conleth Hill's Guillaume. The assistant is a walking contradiction - a loyal traitor, whose ruination of Brandt at the same time brings down the portly, sweaty, ever-smiling Guillaume.

Democracy generates the constant hum of activity - what Guillaume late in the play calls "the complexity of counterpoint" - accompanying life at Brandt's headquarters. It is played out on two levels of Peter J. Davison's set.

Britain has always fielded capable character actors, and Democracy gives eight of them a chance to shine. David Ryall lends his beady-eyed authority to Herbert Wehner, Brandt's party leader in the Bundestag, while Glyn Grain's tanned, distinguished countenance is perfect for Helmut Schmidt, Brandt's eventual successor.

The play's heart, however, lies with its two exemplary leads. Having played Hitler several years back in the National production of Albert Speer, Allam brings a quiet melancholy to the womanizing if seemingly guileless Brandt. By play's end, Allam seems imperceptibly to have aged and gone sour, even if part of Brandt's bequest - the play suggests - was to make East and West Berlin whole.

Hill, an Irish sensation in the play Stones in His Pockets, reinvents himself here. Donning glasses, the round-faced actor employs a neutral English accent to play the grinning onlooker who was always ready to inform on Brandt to his controller, Kretschmann (played by a sly Steven Pacey, who is seated almost throughout to one side of the stage).

The performance shows the price paid by a life of deception, the voice of Hill's somewhat campy Guillaume by the end containing its own distinct death rattle. Playing a "little man" who helped lay a great statesman low, this fine actor vaults to the front ranks in a play that is right up there with him.

The Times - Benedict Nightingale - 11/09/2003

Brandt and the spy who loved him

WILLY BRANDT has triumphed at the polls, and his nerdiest PA is toasting the victory in champagne. “May I say, chief,” he gulps, “that working with you has been the best thing that has happened to me or ever will?” One irony is that the speaker is Günter Guillaume, a Stasi officer employed by Markus Wolf. Another is that he genuinely feels and means what he says.

As in Copenhagen, Michael Frayn is dealing with recent European history, and the result is another fascinating play. Perhaps Democracy isn’t quite as subtle or rich as the earlier piece. Perhaps those unfamiliar with the intricacies of German coalition politics in the 1970s will have the odd dizzy moment, as those of us ignorant of nuclear physics did in Copenhagen. But, thanks to the skills of Frayn and the director Michael Blakemore, I was gripped throughout by the events unfolding in an office-cum-café set, on which Conleth Hill’s Guillaume can simultaneously talk to Roger Allam’s Brandt and report to Steven Pacey, his Stasi controller.

This narrative clarity is even more impressive because of Frayn’s stated theme, which is “the complexity of human arrangements and human beings themselves and the difficulties this creates in both shaping and understanding our actions”. What’s in Guillaume’s heart when, after years at Brandt’s side, he’s arraigned for spying? All sorts of things, perhaps, but certainly devotion to the charismatic Chancellor he has systematically betrayed. What he finds particularly unbearable is the suggestion that he might have fed his masters news and photos of Brandt’s womanising. “Not me, chief,” he cries.

Hill’s Guillaume begins as eager-to-please, slightly smarmy, and, when matters of state are being discussed, as anonymous as a hatstand; but, thanks to the “ray of sunshine” that is Brandt’s fellowship, he’s a more questioning and self-questioning man by the play’s end.

And Allam’s Brandt is still more layered, as befits a man who spent the 1930s and 1940s using aliases galore: indecisive, impulsive, warm, aloof, innocent yet shrewd, and broader of mind and deeper of soul than the colleagues murkily manoeuvring around him.

Brandt’s boldest policy was Ostpolitik and his greatest achievement a degree of reconciliation with his Eastern neighbours. And here, suggests Frayn, is the biggest irony of all. Guillaume convinced them that Brandt was trustworthy; they used their bribes to keep him in office; the Russians felt less need to protect East Germany; the Wall came down, followed by Communism itself.

Markus Wolf unwittingly destroyed Markus Wolf. Did the real Guillaume approve? Frayn’s Guillaume surely does.

Independant - 11/09/2003 - Paul Taylor

Making drama out of a political crisis

One of the last roles that Roger Allam played at the National Theatre was Adolf Hitler. He reappears now as Willy Brandt. This is tantamount to being cast successively as Satan and the Messiah. Brandt, who became Chancellor of the Federal Republic in 1969, did much to reverse the Führer's monstrous legacy, and his Ostpolitik was designed to promote peace in Europe by recognising, and regularising relations with, communist East Germany. Winning the Nobel prize in 1971, he was brought down by a scandal three years later when Günter Guillaume, a close personal aide, was unmasked as a Stasi spy.

Democracy, Michael Frayn's complex and richly rewarding new play, does not keep you in suspense about this agent's true colours. Quite the opposite. It's plain from the start and as he performs his (increasingly intimate) duties in Brandt's service, Conleth Hill's superb Guillaume - a troubled man posing as an unctuous nonentity - rattles out a running commentary to his East German controller, Kretschmann, who sits at a table as though directly observing. Thanks to this fluid, fertile comic device, the presentation of the West German government is infiltrated by irony from the outset.

The play is wonderfully alert to the piquant paradoxes and ironic twists of this intensely tricky period in Germany's conversation with itself. Initially distrusting the sincerity of Brandt's Ostpolitik, the East Germans wind up more intent on keeping the Chancellor in power than many of his own resentful SDP colleagues. As sketched here, post-war West Germany is a world where power depends on unstable, ill-natured coalitions and a bizarre partner-swapping game where an old ex-Communist can find himself forced into bed politically with an elderly former Nazi. Only Brandt, who fled the Gestapo and worked for the resistance in Scandinavia, is untainted by the war - though, to some, clean hands are themselves suspect.

As the Chancellor, Roger Allam gives a highly impressive performance, capturing the man's magnetism, his constitutional melancholy and a strange sense that the idolised public figure is a mask with no one behind it. On a split-level office set populated exclusively by men in suits, Michael Blakemore's excellent production controls the rapidly shifting moods with great sensitivity, particularly in those uncomfortable meditative moments when politician and spy, symbols of Germany's ideological divide, are seen to have haunting affinities. The pressures of history have left both with a strong feeling of self-alienation. Forced to assume various identities when on the run from the Gestapo, Brandt now describes himself as a suitcase with a series of false bottoms, unable to reconnect with the boy he once was. For Guillaume, a brief trip back to the GDR was like "eavesdropping on my own absence".

Even in their downfalls, these fatherless, womanising males are akin. Brandt fatalistically resigns when, innocent of duplicity, he could have survived. On arrest, Guillaume instantly confesses his guilt, thereby betraying his own political masters and giving the West Germans the watertight case against him they would not otherwise have. But while it irks the spy that he has been used by the GDR, it distresses him greatly that his case is exploited as a way of unseating Brandt, the man he has come to revere.

At the end, the Wall has come down, and Guillaume is just a face in the crowd that is cheering the former Chancellor on his tour. A single nation once more; but, tragically for the ex-spy, never again the double act that ironically pulled together in a time of division. Shaping a huge mass of material into intellectually stimulating patterns, Democracy offers a great deal more than a crash course in recent German politics.

Telegraph - 11/09/2003 - Charles Spencer

Frayn pulls off another unlikely triumph

Michael Frayn, who has just turned 70, is on an amazing roll. His brilliant farce Noises Off is back for its umpteenth run in the West End. His last novel, Spies, was pipped to the Whitbread Prize only by his wife Claire Tomalin's biography of Pepys. And this new play, Democracy, is the most intelligent and gripping new English drama since, well, since Frayn's last stage outing with Copenhagen in 1998.

You have to work hard at a Frayn play. Ferociously intelligent himself, he expects his audience to keep up with him. Here, in his own words, he has written a drama about complexity - "the complexity of human arrangements and of human beings themselves, and the difficulties that this creates in both shaping and understanding our actions".

When I add that Democracy is also a first-rate spy story and an analysis of the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's successful attempt to achieve a degree of reconciliation with his country's former enemies in Eastern Europe, you will realise that this is a piece of rare ambition. But, in Michael Blakemore's lucid, superbly acted production at the National's Cottesloe Theatre, Democracy also offers great entertainment. The prospect of watching 10 middle-aged men in suits (there are no women in the cast) re-enacting the German politics of three decades ago may sound daunting, but attention never flags.

It is, of course, the spy-story element, so familiar from the Cold War novels of Le Carre and Deighton, that initially grabs attention. Almost as soon as he became Chancellor, Brandt was shadowed by one Günter Guillaume, an apparently servile, nondescript functionary, who eventually became his personal assistant. He served Brandt devotedly, but he was equally devoted to his other role of spying for the Stasi.

During the play, we watch Guillaume worming his way into Brandt's confidence and then reporting everything he has discovered to his East German control. But it is here that Frayn's perennial fascination with complexity comes in, the way the human brain and heart can simultaneously pursue two apparently contradictory ends. Guillaume, in Frayn's portrait, genuinely admires, even loves, Brandt; yet he has no compunction about betraying him. But then, if you view the wider picture, was he actually betraying him at all?

In reporting to the East Germans that Brandt was serious about his Ostpolitik, he encouraged those on the other side of the Berlin Wall to respond in kind. Far from being a simple act of treachery, Guillaume's espionage could be seen as a vital tool in the diplomatic game. The bigger question Frayn doesn't address, however, is whether it was Brandt-style detente or the much harder line subsequently taken against the Soviet bloc by Ronald Reagan that finally played the bigger part in the fall of the wall and the collapse of communism.

It's typical of the play's richness that Frayn could also be writing about New Labour. The charismatic left-of-centre Brandt might be Tony Blair's double, not least in his determination to get everyone on side and his love of portentous soundbites. And, as Brandt falls, surrounded by jealous, plotting colleagues, are we meant to see a premonition of our own great leader's eventual departure?

The production, stylishly designed by Peter J Davison, is dominated by two superb performances. Conleth Hill is wonderfully creepy as Guillaume, the kind of man who has several Biros in his top pocket, wears a permanent obsequious smile and has the nasty habit of putting his face too close to the person he is talking to. There is a delicious hint of leery, Benny Hill campery about him, too.

Roger Allam memorably captures both Brandt's charisma and the doubts and depression that besiege him in his darker private moments, and brings a touch of poetry to the play with his poignant reflections on the other lives he might have lived. With strong support from David Ryall as a deeply devious old politico, Steven Pacey as Guillaume's control, and Glyn Grain as Brandt's unlovable heir apparent, Helmut Schmidt, Democracy undoubtedly gets my vote.

Newsweek International - 14/09/2003 - Tara Pepper

Truth in Government
A new London play examines the fall of Willy Brandt

When British playwright Michael Frayn first visited Berlin in 1972, German Chancellor Willy Brandt was at the height of his popularity, having just won the Nobel Prize for his efforts to reconcile West Germany with the Soviet bloc. Two years later, Brandt’s abrupt resignation painfully captured Frayn’s imagination.

HIS NEW PLAY, Democracy, which premiered last week at London’s National Theatre (through Dec. 30), revolves around the powerful friendship between Brandt and his close personal assistant Günter Guillaume, the Soviet spy who ultimately caused Brandt’s downfall. “I find it endlessly astonishing and moving that Germany managed to recover from a situation of such physical and moral degradation since the war,” Frayn says. “Everything had been corrupted by the Nazis, and somehow out of that, thanks to great political skill, emerged one of the most stable countries in Europe.”

The tension generated by Germany’s tangled politics gives Frayn’s fast-paced play plenty of fizz. East Germany had been sealed behind the Berlin wall in 1961, severing family and cultural bonds. West Germans bitterly opposed losing nearly a quarter of their country’s territory in the east. Brandt’s ability to overcome this division changed the face of Europe, contributing to detente in the cold war and, eventually, the downfall of East Germany and the Soviet empire. Roger Allam as Brandt gives a brilliantly nuanced depiction of a charismatic political leader, one moment basking in public applause, the next plagued by anxiety and self-doubt. When Horst Ehmke, then coordinator of Germany’s secret service, reassures the chancellor that he has the faith of the people, Frayn hits a poetic note with Brandt’s reply: the masses like “the man they hope their hope will make me.”

Though Brandt resigned when it became known that a traitor had infiltrated the highest echelons of his government, the play questions whether Guillaume really betrayed Brandt’s principles at all, suggesting that ultimately they worked toward the same goal. The two had many personal similarities: history had made both men exiles, with no fixed roots. Brandt had changed his name in Norway, where he fled during World War II, assuming different personas to escape the Gestapo. Referring to his old identity, the chancellor says, “That’s the strangest thing of all about Herbert Frahm. The fact that I was him, and he was me. What was it like being him?... What does he make of me?”

The fictional Guillaume finds a brief trip back to East Germany “like eavesdropping on my own absence.” Frayn was filled with similar disorientation on his visit to Berlin. “Everything required the imagination to fill it in because a large part of the center of the city was missing,” he says. “You had to use your imagination to see it had once been the capital of a great country.” Plumbing a more recent past in this rich, witty play, Frayn eloquently captures the elusiveness of human identity and the power wielded over us by what we do not know.

The Sunday Times - 14/09/2003

The spy and the chancellor
Michael Frayn's foray into cold-war politics crackles with life and wit, says Victoria Segal

Twelve years of Hitler. Four years of military government. Twenty years of conservatism and cold war. And now a hope at last of ending the long stalemate in Europe. With Germanic precision, Michael Frayn's new play starts at 11.22am on October 21, 1969, the exact moment Willy Brandt was elected chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, the first leftist leader in more than 40 years. Brandt's rule seemed like Germany's very own Camelot, a golden opportunity to come to terms with the second world war and, most significantly, to reconcile with the East German state that lowered alongside it.

His fall, when it came, was crushing: Günter Guillaume, his personal assistant, was unmasked as an East German agent, triggering a scandal that resulted in Brandt's resignation when it was feared Guillaume's revelations might include blackmail-friendly information on his impressive list of extramarital exploits.

It is rumoured there is more paperwork recording German life in this period than in the whole of the rest of the country's history put together. Democracy could have been as gloomy and confusing as an old archive. Yet, just as Copenhagen broke down events of global magnitude into the atoms of human nature, Democracy (National/Cottesloe) cuts through the history to focus on personal motivation. At times it comes across as The West Wing meets the Eastern Bloc: hugely entertaining, packed with verbal parrying and effortless wit.

What at first appears to be a dispiriting cast of grey, middle-aged men in grey, middle-aged suits quickly separates out into vividly imagined portraits. Roger Allam makes a painfully convincing Brandt, the volatile visionary on the one hand, the Julio Iglesias of the Bundestag on the other. The excellent David Ryall plays the Machiavellian Herbert Wehner, too long in the poison-tipped tooth to worry about the niceties of human interaction, while Glyn Grain plays HeImut Schrnidt as Sir Humphrey with a freshly sharpened axe behind his back. Frayn captures the bitchy wit that often festers in Establishment men and proves that, yes, coalition politics can be fun.

Yet the real centre of power, in the play and in the government, is Guillaume, the "nobody", strikingly conveyed by Conleth Hill. Guillaume comments on events to his handler, Amo Kretschmann (the fittingly pallid Steven Pacey), seated on the stage throughout as a visual reminder of successful infiltration. This is as far as the Spooks-style shadows stretch; the cutaway set is a model of modem Euro-efficiency, only the rows of paperfilled pigeonholes indicating hidden intrigues.

Frayn has the luxury of transparency with his characters, too, and his depiction of Guillaume, a servant devoted to two masters, is an empathic masterstroke. Hill is surprisingly camp, Uriah-humble yet acid-tongued, besotted with Brandt yet irritating enough to be borrowing a stapler in Ricky Gervais's office. There's a touch of Austin Powers, too: when he delivers an especially sly aside to Kretschmann, you expect him to drawl "Ooh, behave!" and head up a Stasi chorus line. It should seem off-key, but with Hill's subtle shadings, it makes perfect sense, the servile softness disparaged by his employers complementing the theatrical flair of a professional liar.

For Democracy is obsessed with the roles people play, the choices they make and the divisions those choices leave behind. Brandt fixates on the lives he might have led, while the unlikely similarities between the chancellor and his increasingly devoted assistant are gently stressed. "How can you see into someone's heart if you don't fall a little in love with them?" says Guillaume when Kretschmann queries his affection for "the chief'. Frayn might be criticised for giving a traitor such warmth, but the play-wright's interest in people, in what it is to be human, means he, too, is a little in love with these characters.

Democracy is an educational play, certainly, filling in a part of history that usually has the allure of a post-war concrete building, yet Frayn also tries to fill in some of the mysteries that lurk within us all. "So many people with so many different views and so many different voices," says Brandt. "And inside each of us, so many more people still, all struggling to be heard." By laying this imaginative wiretap into the lives of Willy Brandt and the spy who loved him, Frayn obtains some valuable secrets of the heart.