A vague sense of impending farce accompanies every encounter with Michael Frayn. Like John Cleese, who played the accident-prone protagonist of the 1986 film Clockwise, the screenplay of which was written by Frayn, he has a tall slim physique that, in repose, folds up like a deckchair. His intelligence and heightened self-awareness are the kind that seem to provoke the physical world to mutiny: pipes burst, tables collapse and mobile phones ring at inopportune moments.
On a recent drizzly autumn evening, the 81-year-old playwright and novelist was booked to address a gathering of people who had braved the weather to hear him speak about his new book, Matchbox Theatre. Waiting to go on, Frayn shook his head, mystified that anyone would bother turning up. “I’d never go to speak to a writer or get a book signed,” he said.
“What about Tolstoy?” I suggested, confident he’d be tempted by the chance to meet a resurrected literary genius and fellow Russian speaker.
“I wouldn’t bother going over to talk to him,” Frayn insisted. “There’d be no point. It would be a disaster.”
It’s impossible to know if he was being serious. Certainly in the Frayn universe, human interactions are fraught with unforeseen threats. Danger, miscommunication and embarrassment tend to increase in proportion to our efforts to avoid them. Striving humans are constantly thwarted by a world that is too difficult for them to grasp. There is, though, an obvious paradox. One of the ways he’s chosen to explore these ideas is through farce: no theatrical form is so highly organised or technically demanding.
Even by the standards of a writer whose career has spanned journalism, novels, philosophy, Russian translation and plays both philosophical and farcical, his new book is something of an oddity. Matchbox Theatre is an homage to those miniature cardboard kits still sold in old-fashioned toy shops, which are folded and glued to create a tiny stage, a proscenium arch, a backdrop and a couple of paper actors. The book that emerges from its pretty yellow and green slipcase is a bibliophile’s exquisite revenge on the app – 30 defiantly analogue playlets intended to be staged in the reader’s brain.
Matchbox Theatre is the accumulated work of years, comprising the sketches Frayn has made between projects. They might also be a tentative answer to the question of whether he’s primarily a novelist or a dramatist: the building blocks of his imagination seem to take a dialogic form. Each sketch, like a short story or a chess problem, represents the working out of a single idea.
A welcome, an interval and an apologetic postmortem (“Oh God, you weren’t in tonight, were you? Why do people always come on the wrong night?”) continue the conceit of a performance. There is much satire of the theatre itself: a parody of David Attenborough describes the nocturnal world of stagehands; a cash-strapped production of Shakespeare allows its financial backers to join the actors onstage; a director is disturbed by the lack of verisimilitude in a real-life street scene and attempts to rectify it. And, naturally, much of the time communication goes hopelessly awry: parting lovers can’t hear each other over an airport tannoy; a spouse is never able to reach the end of a sentence without interruption; a stroke survivor, perfectly compos mentis but unable to speak, is exasperated by a patronising visitor. A man speaking about the distractions of mobile technology is repeatedly interrupted by his own phone and an unfolding domestic drama of chaos and personal humiliation. In “Cold Calling”, the Nobel prize committee can’t persuade the awards’ recipients that they’re not nuisance callers.
Matchbox Theatre is also a return to Frayn’s earliest literary endeavours in sketch comedy. More than 50 years ago, he wrote and directed the Footlights Revue at Cambridge. It was, as he tells it, a disaster that turned him off the theatre for a decade. He was following a series of illustrious productions that had transferred from Cambridge to the West End. “We were all very ambitious,” he says. “A lot of us wanted to work in showbusiness, so it was a very important showcase because a lot of producers and agents came to see it.” His production failed to win a transfer. “My show didn’t go. And it didn’t go for a good reason, because it wasn’t funny and nobody laughed at it.”
According to Frayn, he slunk away from the stage and avenged himself by sniping in the pages of this paper about the shortcomings of the theatre. It wasn’t until he was 37 that he was tempted back to write his first play.
A recurring motif in his conversation is that it’s in the laboratory of the theatre that we learn what is funny, what works and why people act as they do. It’s also the place that exposes the jargon, self-delusion and impotence that accompanies most human endeavour. “This is a model of what we all do in life,” he says. “We all try to present ourselves to the world in some kind of way. It’s people talking to an audience, and an audience trying to understand what they’re up to.”
The theme is consistent across his work. In 1998’s lyrical and melancholy play Copenhagen, Frayn took the mysterious 1941 encounter between the physicist Werner Heisenberg and his friend and mentor Niels Bohr and developed it according to the absurd logic of a quantum experiment. The play seemed to suggest that Heisenberg’s visit was a performance in which he was trying to reveal his motives to himself.
In his book of philosophy The Human Touch, Frayn went beyond Shakespeare and described the observable universe as a stage: curved space itself becomes a theatrical performance that is rendered meaningful by the wondering gaze of human spectators. “There’s a fundamental paradox,” he muses. “Human beings are plainly irrelevant to the world. We arrived very late in the history of the world. We occupy only a tiny, tiny corner of the universe, and we’re going to die out long before the universe does. And in another sense, the universe only exists because there are creatures to deal with it in some kind of way, to talk about it, to see it, to hear it.”
After The Human Touch was published, Frayn was invited to defend his ideas to the scientists at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, where the world wide web was born, and one of the most eminent research institutes on the planet.
It strikes me that at the point where Frayn left for Geneva, speech in briefcase, to do battle with recalcitrant international flights, hostile luggage carousels and a supercilious academic audience, he had accepted the destiny of one of his protagonists: those farcical cousins of Sisyphus who seem doomed for a lifetime to roll big custard pies up a hill. I suggest he was a brave man to take up the challenge.
“I don’t think I made any converts,” he says. “Scientists are natural Platonists. They believe that numbers and the laws of science are real, independent entities. I think they’re constructions of human thought that attempt to seize something of the universe, but can be endlessly improved. But they were very nice about it ...”
• Marcel Theroux’s Strange Bodies is published by Faber. To order Matchbox Theatre for £10.39 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
