Democracy
By Michael Frayn
Directed by Jim Petosa
Olney Theatre Center
Through Aug. 12
By Alexander C. Kafka
A complex, talky drama about German politics and spying in the 1970s. Who needs this? you might ask, and you wouldn’t be alone. Indeed, my three viewing companions at the D.C. area premiere of Michael Frayn’s Democracy at Olney thought as much Saturday night, and I bet others in the audience, which treated curtain calls coolly, were of similar opinion. But I like this flawed but thought-provoking drama in director Jim Petosa's handsome and powerful production.
The play details German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s betrayal by his personal assistant, Gunter Guillaume, who turns out to be an East German spy. It was received enthusiastically in London in 2003, but while The New York Times and The New York Post gave the next year’s Broadway production kudos, most other reviews treated it roughly. “The play is shockingly boring,” wrote Margaret Croyden of New York Theatre Wire in one such pan. “For almost three hours people talk—endlessly—about German politics during the late '60s and early '70s. … It is almost impossible to know what Willy Brandt stood for at all, and what the point of the play is with this mishmash of German politics more than 30 years ago. And do we care? And do we want to sit for almost three hours listening to all this?”
Croyden’s queries were rhetorical, of course. But I would answer them with a resounding, if not an ecstatic, Yes. It’s difficult to understand what Brandt stood for in some matters because he didn’t know himself. As his cabinet ministers point out repeatedly in the play, he’s indecisive and too eager to compromise and try to make everyone happy. But we do know this: After 40 years of fascist, military, and conservative rule, Brandt, as head of a delicate liberal parliamentary coalition, wanted relations between Western and Eastern Europe to warm and for the two Germany’s to at least acknowledge the damage they’d undergone in fracturing, begin to view each other with more empathy, and at least consider how they might begin picking up the political pieces. “Have the courage to show compassion,” he urged his countrymen. The “point,” as Croyden puts it, was a new vision for Europe and a sea change in perception of the Cold War. And if we don’t care about such things, what on earth should we care about?
Let’s go back for a moment to that Croyden review, just because it’s a concise summary of many critiques of Democracy. “The play also tries to show that Willy Brandt was a womanizer, a heavy drinker, and suffered depression and ambivalence, as he tried to steer Germany toward maintaining their newly formed democracy,” she says. “But we do not see a believable character in action. Brandt's dilemma, his personality, and the political conditions during his tenure are discussed and argued endlessly but never dramatized. And the story then becomes impossible to follow with its complicated array of the numerous parties involved, and the varying positions of its members. It is also almost impossible to identify all the cabinet members as they argue, scheme, backbite, and connive.”
Some of those complaints strike closer to the mark, though I would, at the least, amend them. I found Brandt to be a perfectly believable character. In fact, as a number of observers have pointed out, his similarity to two later, charismatic, too-eager-to-please and be-pleased leaders—Bill Clinton and Tony Blair—provides an additional layer of resonance in the play. But it’s true that his conundrums and foibles are more discussed than dramatized, or dramatized so sketchily that they don’t have the impact they should. And yes, beyond a few principals, the cabinet members do tend to blend and blur a bit. Frayn addressed that issue—having a stage with “ten men in suits”—in a 2003 interview. “I hate the idea of writing a play that's entirely male characters; it's absolutely awful,” he said. “But it just is the case that there were very few women in German politics at the time. As I've said in the postscript, if German politics hadn't been quite so closed off from normal demographic reality, Brandt's government might have had a rather better fate than it did.”
That answer seems a little disingenuous. With all the dramatic license Frayn takes, there’s no reason why he couldn’t bring into the telling one of Brandt’s mistresses, or his wife, or Guillaume’s wife (who was also an East German spy), or one of Guillaume’s mistresses, or some composite woman figure. But I think Frayn was right not to. If he had, it would have undermined the at once competitive, invigorating, and poisonous boys' club atmosphere of the administration in Bonn (the program mistakenly says Berlin’s the setting—it’s not). The flow of testosterone is a key part of the narrative, and beyond a core group of players, it’s not particularly necessary to keep track of all the characters in detail, any more than it’s important to know who all those shirtsleeved Post editors are in the movie of All the President’s Men, or all the pawns on a chess board. Visually, the bland, uniform maleness is also effective. It allows for a Magritte-like modernity and interchangeability that jibes well with a core theme of the drama: how utterly dispensable political figures ultimately are, and how they’re at the winds of social and historical changes they can’t fully fathom, much less control.
Fine, so I’m clearly an apologist for eggheaded talky dramas, especially Frayn’s and, even more so, Tom Stoppard’s. And yet there’s a charge that Croyden doesn’t level, but that I would, and that’s less a lack of drama than a lack of moral accountability in the work. As some critics, but more historians, fumed about the Frayn hit Copenhagen, he has a habit, at the end of all his painstaking research, of throwing up his hands and sliding into somewhat grandiose soliloquies about how I could be you and you me, and maybe you’re evil but maybe I am, and maybe you’re a spy, but maybe I’m a spy of a different sort, and how much do any of us really know about our true makeup and intentions and motivations, etc. etc. In some grand sense, all true. In a narrower historical sense, poppycock, especially when concerning (in Copenhagen) Nazis and their sympathizers or (in Democracy) concerning East Germany’s pervasive and ruthless interior and foreign intelligence apparatus.
“Democracy is really what it's about,” Frayn says in that same 2003 interview about the drama’s name. “The play is about how difficult it is for everyone to come to any common policy on anything, not just in political life but … how you arrange the furniture in the living room or where you go on holiday. Anything that involves more than one person involves a type of political debate, compromise, trying to guess what other people's real feelings are, trying to be tactful. It's a difficult process and inevitably involves compromise and error. So, the play is partly about the democracy of all social life, but I think human beings are kind of democracies within themselves. Each of us has all kinds of different possibilities within himself or herself, and getting those possibilities together, getting some practical behavior to emerge from all the possible selves one has inside oneself, is as difficult as public democracy.”
Hmm. Debating where to place the loveseat strikes me as a little different than deciding to commit espionage, and though there are murmurs and squeaks of outrage in the play, there’s not enough for my taste.
Yet more than making up for that are the wonderfully rich ironies that Frayn mines, sometimes quite explicitly, sometimes less so. Among them: that the East Germans and Brandt want many of the same outcomes and become unspoken allies against the more-mundane backstabbing known as representative democracy; that Brandt himself, as a young man fleeing the Nazis, had assumed numerous aliases and backstories as a journalist and left-wing political provocateur; that Brandt, with his depressions and open self-doubts, alienated his son, while Guillaume, who showed no doubts or disloyalties whatsoever but was false to his very core, enjoyed a peaceable weekend father-son camaraderie; and on and on. Dozens of ironies, many relating to Brandt and Guillaume as mirror images, though twisted ones. “Is it him I’m seeing in the half light,” Guillaume asks at one point, “or is it a reflection of myself?” The longer you ponder the historical situation and the play’s distillation of it, the more ironies you find. Even if that were the play’s and the production’s only achievement, it would be a huge one. But there are many other things that Frayn and director Jim Petosa’s team can boast of.
For one, a very good cast, if not an ideal one.
Jeffries Thaiss is a lively Guillaume, but sometimes too lively, verging on hysteric. As the office sycophant early on who laughs too hard and is too eager to please, he’s quite convincing. “I’m the hat stand in the corner,” he tells his spy handler, Arno. But as events unfold, he becomes a pretty ostentatious hat stand, lurching a little into Anthony Perkins-type staring and braying and smirking and idolatry. Far from an inconspicuous mole, this Guillaume would more likely be sent to HR for drug testing—though, under slightly different circumstances, the same might have been said of Brandt.
As Brandt, Andrew Long is dignified and likeable, but doesn’t have quite the crackle, the sex appeal, that literally makes people swoon in the presence of such politicians. And Long’s performance as well as the technical aspects of the production fail to offer the shiver quotient the play requires of such famed moments as Brandt’s kneeling at the Warsaw ghetto or his silent hand gestures on his historic East German tour. We can picture the moments, in theatrical translation if not memory, but we can’t, in Olney’s version, really feel them.
Richard Pilcher as Horst Ehmke, director of the Chancellor’s office in Brandt’s first term, is excellent, radiating competence and savvy in Democracy’s equivalent of the Leo McGarry character of The West Wing. Vincent Clark as Helmut Schmidt, the Social Democrat poohbah who served as defense and finance minister under Brandt and ultimately succeeded him, is interestingly wary and equivocating. Hugh Nees plays “Uncle” Herbert Werner, who does the dirty work to keep ministers and party underlings alike in line. Though also intriguingly Machiavellian, Nees has, for all his growling, an underlying cuddliness that undermines Werner’s sinister intensity. Everyone keeps talking about how ugly Werner is. But like Brandt, you kind of want to hug Nees’s Werner, and if that strange cuteness is part of his dark power, that could be made clearer.
James Slaughter, as Guillaume’s East German spy handler, Arno Kretschmann, is very good in a difficult role. He’s onstage constantly, sometimes just lurking off on a stairway. He prompts and cajoles Guillaume, but mostly just listens to him. To listen intently and meaningfully in such a visible way is an arduous dramatic assignment, but he pulls it off without seeming either tiresome or ridiculous, the way a lesser actor might. Nick DePinto plays Ullrich Bauhaus, the secret service guard whose resentments build as Brandt uses him increasingly as pimp, porter, and bartender. DePinto’s body language, as much as his lines, conveys the little volcano building within him.
James Kronzer’s set is superb. Half is the exterior, and half the interior, of a generic but imposing staircase-lined old building that not only reflects the other facades and interiors of the story, but also works as administrative office, jail, and other malleable holding areas for public figures we don’t look at too closely, or let out of our sight. Daniel MacLean Wagner’s warm yellow-hued lighting serves as a proxy for openness and the West, while his fluorescent pale equals the East, interiors, and fear.
Brandt, early on, says he is seeking “a fatherland of love and justice,” and Guillaume says of Brandt and himself, “Our stars are linked.” Indeed they were, on the rise and in falling. That’s what democracy is, right? The linking of all our stars. For all their failings, I admire Frayn’s ambitious play and Olney’s ambitious treatment of it because they bring the scary truth of that interdependence home to our bruised, fickle, cynical citizens’ hearts.
Photos by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center:
1. Andrew Long as Willy Brandt and Jeffries Thaiss as Gunter Guillaume
2. Center: Andrew Long as Willy Brandt; behind, from left to right, Vincent Clark as Helmut Schmidt, James Konicek as Gunter Nollau, Nick DePinto as Ulrich Bauhaus,
