Unable as I was to see Paul Miller’s revival along with the other plays in the Michael Frayn retrospective at Sheffield earlier this year, I am grateful for the opportunity to catch up with it on a London stint at The Old Vic, which itself launched last year the revival of Frayn’s farce Noises Off now approaching the end of its own West End transfer run.
    
This extra lease of life for Democracy is entirely deserved. Frayn’s 2003 play treats with characteristic intelligence and dramatic skill a topic which might not seem all that theatrical. The subject here is Günter Guillaume’s years as an East German spy in the office of West German chancellor Willy Brandt, the discovery of which catalysed Brandt’s resignation in 1974 (entirely undesirably for Guillaume’s DDR spymasters). Guillaume is portrayed as divided not so much between opposing loyalties as between a clear ideological fidelity to the DDR and a deep personal fondness for Brandt, whose personal style of government and presentation finally laid to rest West Germany’s uneasy post-WW2 polity as much as did his pragmatic Ostpolitik. Frayn shows us not just Guillaume’s personal conflicts but also the faction-fighting both within Brandt’s SPD and in its governing coalition with the Free Democrats (referred to throughout as “the Liberals”, in a move which chimes with current British arrangements). As with so many Frayn plays, we get not non-stop drama but rather a series of narrations alternating with illustrative scenes, yet this structure never feels unnatural nor the story stilted.
    
The role of Guillaume, created in 2003 by Conleth Hill, is now taken by another protean Irish actor, Aidan McArdle, who shows a little less hinterland but still portrays a rounded, living figure. As Brandt, Patrick Drury is a little detached, especially compared to those around him: Richard Hope as Horst Ehmke who inadvertently gave Guillaume his entrée into government’s inner circles; William Hoyland as the ageing party schemer Herbert Wehner; and David Mallinson, who in the antagonistic role of Brandt’s eventual successor Helmut Schmidt bears an unsettling resemblance to the late actor Günter Meisner. (Astoundingly, Brandt’s own son Matthias played Guillaume in a 2003 film unrelated to this play.) Miller’s staging is simple and clear, and Frayn is reconfirmed as one of our greatest dramatic demystifiers.

Written for the Financial Times.