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JOHN GIELGUD
Actor
Talking about playing the classics, including Hamlet
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JUDI DENCH
Actor
Reflects on childhood and deciding to be an actress |
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Michael Frayn b1933
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Born in London, Frayn was educated at Cambridge. After graduation, he worked as a journalist for the Guardian and the Observer, becoming well known as a witty and sharply satirical columnist. In 1970, his first play, The Two of Us, was staged in London's West End. A brilliant satirist, Frayn has made use of his journalistic background, notably in Alphabetical Order (1975), a play set in the cuttings library of a provincial newspaper. His novels The Tin Men (1965) and Towards the End of the Morning (1967) also have a newspaper ambience. Frayn has been compared to the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov, many of whose plays he has translated. Like Chekhov, his plays and novels often reveal a darkly ambiguous character, but Frayn's humour tends to be broader, notably in his hilarious play Noises Off (1982, film 1992). This describes a group of actors rehearsing a sex farce and is considered one of the funniest plays of recent times. In the 1990s, Frayn's work took on a darker aspect, as in the novels A Landing on the Sun (1991) and Now You Know (1992). In 1998, his novel Headlong, dealing with the machinations of an art historian who believes he has discovered a Bruegel painting, was shortlisted for the Booker prize. In the same year, Frayn's play Copenhagen, which proposes an encounter between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, was staged at the National Theatre. A highly accomplished dramatist and author, Frayn has also written documentaries and plays for television and the screenplay for the film Clockwise (1985), starring John Cleese. He has also had published a collection of translations of 5 of Chekhov's plays.
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KEY WORKS INCLUDE:
The novel - The Tin Men (1965)
The novel - Towards the End of Morning (1967)
The novel - A Very Private Life (1968)
The play - Alphabetical Order (1975)
The play - Donkeys' Years (1977)
The play - Noises Off (1982)
The novel - The Trick of It (1989)
The novel - A Landing on the Sun (1991)
The novel - Now You Know (1992)
The novel - Headlong (1998)
The play - Copenhagen (1998)
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