Review: Democracy

Michael Frayn is a highly comic writer, with a touch that can turn the ridiculous into the ridiculously funny.

Not that you would know it from the Michael Frayn season in Sheffield.

We can’t really applaud the Sheffield Theatres management much more than we already have for having the vision to stage a whole season of work by a single writer: last year David Hare, this year Michael Frayn.

Although this production, of the writer’s 2003 National Theatre hit is in the most prestigious of the three spaces of Sheffield Theatres, it feels like it is tagged on to the Frayn season. With Benefactors opening first, Copenhagen, the most acclaimed of the plays that make up the season having already been and gone, Democracy follows in the wake a little.

Which makes it feel like it hasn’t been given quite the same opportunity to shine, although it is as rigidly interrogated and solidly directed as either of the other two pieces that make up the season.

Where Benefactors is a domestic story with a wider resonance and Copenhagen a global story with an intimate heart, in Democracy Frayn straddles several different worlds.

Set in 1970s Germany, Willy Brandt has been elected Chancellor at a time of difficulty and is trying to manage the minefield of a coalition government. Yes, Frayn’s prescience is unnerving. In the office is an unnoticed clerk, Gunther Guillaume, actually a spy.

So the story is set up to be about betrayal, loyalty, all those old themes that have kept dramatists busy since the Greeks started writing plays.

The frame around the relationship at the heart of the piece is East and West German politics, communism and capitalism, some of the huge notions from which Frayn never seems to shirk. It makes for a piece that is, frankly, a little hard work. It comes alive most when the human drama, and what is at stake within that, is at the centre of the stage.

This is helped enormously by Aidan McArdle as Guillaume, who appears to be channeling Paul Giamatti and his journey towards actual loyalty to the initially austere leader on whom he has been sent to spy.

None of this is to say that the production’s frame of German politics isn’t engrossing – it is – just that the audience has to work that much harder at this piece than they were required to with Copenhagen and Benefactors. Ultimately, it is as rewarding as those two pieces.

To March 31.