Frayn, Michael

Frayn, Michael (1933- ), English dramatist and novelist. Born in London, he was educated at Cambridge University. He was a journalist on the Guardian and The Observer newspapers until the production of his first play, The Two of Us, in London's West End in 1970. With subsequent plays such as Alphabetical Order (1975), set in the cuttings library of a provincial newspaper, Make and Break (1980), about salesmen at a foreign trade fair, and the highly successful Noises Off (1981), about the theatre, he became well known as a satirist and farceur. He has adapted plays by Jean Anouilh, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy and written novels in a similar spirit to his plays, including The Tin Men (1965), Towards the End of the Morning (1967), both of which are about newspapers, A Landing on the Sun (1991), and Now You Know (1992). Frayn also wrote the script for the film Clockwise (1986), which starred John Cleese as a harassed schoolteacher, and Remember Me? (1997). In 1998, Copenhagen, his play based on a meeting in 1941 between the pioneers of quantum physics Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, was an award-winning success at the National Theatre and his comedy Alarms and Excursions ran at the Gielgud. His play Democracy, about the West German chancellor Willy Brandt and his personal assistant Günther Guillaume, who later turned out to be an East German spy, was also produced by the National in 2003. His recent novels are Headlong (1999), nominated for the Booker Prize, in which the narrator thinks he has discovered an unknown masterpiece by Brueghel, and Spies (2002), a novel of childhood set during World War II.