ROUNDABOUT BLOG

Michael Frayn

Ted Sod spoke with Noises Off playwright Michael Frayn about writing and the history of Noises Off.

TED SOD: Will you give us some background information on yourself: When were you born? Where were you educated? Did you have any teachers who had a profound effect on you?

MICHAEL FRAYN: I was born in 1933, in the north-western suburbs of London, and brought up in the south-western suburbs. My father was a rep for a firm that made asbestos building materials. I wrote a memoir of him a few years ago (My Father’s Fortune), and began to understand for the first time what problems he’d been set in life, and how courageously he had dealt with them.

One of the difficulties was the death of his wife, my mother, when I was 12. In the subsequent turmoil I went through a rather bad patch, from which I was rescued by a remarkable English teacher at my grammar (high) school, and a remarkable friend. It’s all there in My Father’s Fortune.

Thereafter nothing but good luck. Even military service was a blessing, because I was sent to train as a Russian interpreter on a course run by Cambridge University. After which I was back in Cambridge as an undergraduate, reading Moral Sciences. You don’t know what Moral Sciences are? Of course you don’t. No one outside the Moral Sciences Department knew, which veiled the subject in a certain awe-inspiring mystery, like the clouds gathered around a mountain peak. It’s since become the Philosophy Department. Every university has a philosophy department, and the veil has been rent. In my last year I was taught by Jonathan Bennett, who has subsequently become a distinguished philosopher, and who has remained a friend. I caught him in his first year of teaching, when he had time, energy, and youthful aggression enough to give full rein to his natural argumentativeness – sometimes not just for the prescribed hour’s personal tuition each week, but for another three, four, or five hours. He wouldn’t agree about anything, even whether it was raining or not. It was a good way to learn philosophy.

TS: I read you were inspired to write Noises Off after seeing a farce you’d written entitled The Two of Us being performed from the perspective of backstage. What was the first thing you did once you had the idea?

MF: I wrote a 15-minute version of the idea for a theatrical charity evening. Michael Codron, the great London producer who has done the first productions of most of my plays over the years, then commissioned a full-length version – the only commission I have ever taken for an original play. In the short version you had to take in everything, onstage and backstage, before, during, and after, simultaneously. Watching it I realized that it would be better to take it one stage at a time, in three acts.

TS: Noises Off features a play-within-a-play entitled Nothing On – what was your inspiration for the characters and plot of that play? Were you satirizing aspects of your own play, Donkeys’ Years?

MF: Good God – I hope Donkeys’ Years is a cut above Nothing On! The play-within-the-play I originally wrote was a pastiche of Feydeau. It’s particularly enjoyable pastiching Feydeau, because he’s so good, but I reluctantly decided that the piece my wretched company was dragging around the country was more likely to be an English sex farce. I’d never actually seen one, so that was my research – watching a few English sex farces. Grim work.

TS: What was the most challenging part of writing Noises Off? What part was the most fun?

MF: I found it all pretty grueling. Everything front stage is interconnected with everything backstage. Everything in each of the three different performances of Nothing On is interconnected. The whole thing is a bit like one of the turbulent systems studied in chaos theory, where the slightest change affects everything else. I was also undermined by doubt about whether actors could ever learn the long wordless pantomime backstage (and it is in fact very difficult) – also whether actors would be prepared to perform a substantial proportion of the play not to the audience but to the back wall of the theatre, which was unlikely to reward their efforts with much sign of appreciation. I became more and more certain as I worked that the play would never be performed. I just went on with it so that I could put the typescript on the shelf, forget about it, and move on to something else.

TS: What do you look for in a director? How do you collaborate with a director? What are the most important traits the actors need for a successful production of Noises Off?

MF: The first productions of most of my plays have been done by Michael Blakemore. This is the real test of a director – the first production of a new piece, when no one knows whether it’s going to work or not. (A test which Jeremy Herrin has passed triumphantly on a number of occasions, incidentally.) Michael and I go through the text together line by line, and he asks stupid questions (always the best questions to ask). In the case of Noises Off he made many suggestions for both clarifying and developing the action, and he deserves a great deal of the credit for getting the play to work. As for the actors…the more I have worked with actors the more I have come to admire them, and the less I have understood how they have not only the skill but the courage to do whatever they do. Including physical courage, in the case of Noises Off. Slamming doors and precipitous staircases make for the kind of dangerous environment that would be outlawed by health and safety legislation in a factory, and a lot of actors have got hurt over the years. Many sprains and bruises, and I have twice seen blood rather copiously spilt on stage.

TS: I understand the 2000 version of the script is different from the one written in 1982. What made you decide to revise a highly successful script? Will there be any changes to the script for Roundabout’s production? Will you participate in rehearsals?

MF: The more often you see a play performed the more your fingers itch to improve it, particularly by means of the delete key. One of the bigger reforms for the production in 2000 was finding a way to suppress the second interval. It’s plainly a three-act play, as many plays were in those far-off days when I wrote it. Difficult now, though, to persuade audiences to go back into battle in the bar twice in one evening. For this production I have made only two small further cuts. I think that the most useful contribution an author can make in the rehearsal room is to stay out of it.

TS: If you were an actor, which role would you want to play in Noises Off/Nothing On?

MF: I’d like to be an actor whose agent had managed to get him a part in something else instead. Preferably one with armchairs to sit in.

TS: How do you keep yourself inspired as an artist? Do you read? Travel? Go to museums, see theatre? What feeds your imagination?

MF: Ideas come – or don’t – from entirely unpredictable sources and in entirely unpredictable circumstances. My wife insists that holidays help. It may be true. I can certainly recall getting the idea for one of my novels as we drove through the San Gabriel Mountains on our way into LA, and a huge bird (which I immediately identified, thrillingly but almost certainly wrongly, as an American bald eagle, and which I decided on mature reflection had probably been a condor) took off from the road just in front of the car. The project that instantaneously flashed into my head at that moment, I should say, had nothing whatsoever to do with eagles, or condors, or birds of any sort, or for that matter with the San Gabriels, or Los Angeles, or driving, or America.

TS: What advice would you give to a young person who wants to write for the theatre? I understand you once said: “Just do it.” Is that really all it takes to be a working writer?

MF: How do you get up in the morning? You just do it. Or not, as the case may be. Whatever training or preparation you put yourself through to write something, likewise, in the end you’re going to have to…well, yes…just do it. Or, again, not. Writers are the ones who manage to, non-writers are the ones who don’t. This still of course leaves open the question of whether the result, if there is one, is going to be any good. But that’s another matter altogether.

TS: What are you writing now?

MF: Interviews like this one, mostly, and introductions to reissues, etc. After-sales service, mopping-up operations. Meanwhile, of course, half hoping, half fearing, that there may yet be another condor round the next bend in the road.

Noises Off begins performances December 17 at the American Airlines Theatre. For tickets and more information, please visit our website.