Michael Frayn's theater accomplishments are truly amazing. With his two previous signature works, Noises Off and Copenhagen, the playwright ranged from backstage farce to nuclear fission and uncertainty theory. Now with Democracy, he has veered off into high-stakes Cold War politics, spiced with the machinations of party infighting and the deviousness of embedded spies. Yet there isn't a full act of honest-to-God stage dialogue in the three works put together! You probably remember the repetitious rehearsals and disastrous performance of Noises Off, sandwiched around an orgy of frantic backstage mime. Then came the multiple narrators of Copenhagen, the labyrinthine circular structure, and the endless replays of the conversation that might have occurred between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
As Gunter Guillaume, the East German mole who penetrated Chancellor Willy Brandt's inner circle, venerated Brandt, and inadvertently caused his idol's downfall, Richard Thomas delivers more lines of narration than he would have read in voice-overs for a full season of "The Waltons.: Some of this narrative is pumped out to Arno Kretschmann, Gunter's superior officer; some of it bestowed upon us in huge chunks or in hasty asides in the middle of conversations.
Somehow, with Frayn's presentational wizardry and director Michael Blakemore's wily pacing, tension and interest are sustained. No fewer than ten actors are sent scurrying across the two-story set amid electoral, diplomatic, and security crises -- supplying additional levitation. When actual human dialogue takes place, Blakemore slows it to a crawl, keenly aware that we're parched for it, salivating over every word.
Thomas is perfection, energetic in his ordinariness, only mildly distressed that his place in history is parasitic. But the better you remember Willy Brandt, the more James Naughton will seem miscast in the role. Gunter keeps telling us of Brandt's humble beginnings, his scrappy survival skills, and the silent eloquence of his simple gestures. Naughton radiates sophistication and urbanity, his visage is sculpted for Mount Rushmore, and the mellifluous rumble of his voice is instant oratory. Still, Frayn's fascination with the phenomenology of history makes for compelling theater.
I'm sure I would have savored it even more if I hadn't seen a similar formula at work in Copenhagen three times before.
