Katherine MacAlister meets a prolific playwright ahead of a new performance of one of his comedies

That Michael Frayn’s plays are on almost permanently somewhere in the world is a given; that he still appreciates his popularity is more of a surprise.

And yet the 80-year-old is in a humble mood when we speak on the eve of yet another revival, this time Alarms and Excursions, opening at The Theatre Chipping Norton tonight. “My plays only exist when they are being performed and that they are still being given life is reassuring,” he confirms. The prolific playwright, best known perhaps for the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy, has produced some of this country’s favourite work. So it’s fascinating to discover that after getting his fingers burnt at university, Michael Frayn hated the theatre until he was in his 30s.

“I thought it was embarrassing, that it was all so artificial. But then all art forms are artificial, theatre just more so,” he says. But question him further, and Frayn admits that an unsuccessful stint on stage with the Cambridge Footlights was more likely to be responsible for his theatrical rebellion. So what went wrong?

“I wrote all the sketches, and they were very abstract, no student jokes. I suppose it just wasn’t funny,” he sighs, “so I turned against it. I think that’s probably the case.” Hard to imagine when Frayn’s work usually has us in stitches, and yet he got back on the horse.

“Someone invited me to write a one-act play about the state of marriage and I was intrigued.

“I can never resist a challenge. Mine was called Nostalgia and was about a man and his wife revisiting the hotel room where they spent their honeymoon, but this time with their baby. It was about the difference children make to a marriage.” Hooked once again, Frayn then wrote two more plays, put them on altogether with Corin Redgrave and Richard Briers and got two star reviews – the Michael Frayn name being forever after lit up in lights. “Richard Briers gave me Noel Coward’s biography as a first-night present and I thought he had unbroken success, but it wasn’t like that at all – Coward had lots of total flops and it occurred to me that while flops don’t last very long, success does, and when people look back, it’s the successes they remember. “So while there have been many flops and they are very discouraging and painful, you have to let them subside before you can pick yourself up and start over again.”

Considering Frayn is now in his 80s, and as famous as he is, it’s amazing hearing him talk so openly about his huge body of work so honestly, with plays, films (he wrote Clockwise which starred John Cleese) and even 10 novels under his belt. But I suppose by now he at least knows when he’s got a hit on his hands?

“Not the faintest idea, it’s down to a question of public taste, so it can be a nice or nasty surprise. But you never write it for the audience, you write it for the sake of the story. And, besides, they say a play is never written, just rewritten.” Perhaps that’s what keeps Frayn going, that and the volume of ideas that accumulate, providing him with endless subject matter. That’s my job, that’s what I do with my time, but there’s no rhyme nor reason to why something catches your fancy. Every scenario has potential ideas,“ he shrugs. As for Alarms and Excursions, Frayn says he might pop down from London, where he lives with the biographer and literary journalist Claire Tomalin, because he loves Oxford.

“I know Oxford very, very well and have many, many friends there, as well as being a fellow for St Catz (St Catherine’s College), so I occasionally just turn up,” he smiles. As for whether he’s working on anything at the moment, he mutters about “some bits and bobs” before finally relenting and admitting that books and plays “are still the best way of telling the story”, and that he’s totally absorbed in his work, whether he’s “retired” or not. One thing’s for sure, Michael Frayn isn’t done yet. Not by a long way.

SEE IT
Alarms and Excursions runs at The Theatre Chipping Norton from tonight until March 12. Box Office: 01608 642350