Michael Frayn

Michael Frayn wrote both the funniest farce in the modern English repertoire and a play about quantum mechanics and moral responsibility, which is an unusual range. He read philosophy at Cambridge, worked as a reporter and then a columnist on the Guardian and the Observer, and learned Russian during national service - he has translated Chekhov and Tolstoy, and the translations are used as often as the originals in English theatres. Noises Off, first staged in 1982, is a farce about a touring company performing a farce, with the second act played from behind the set in silence; the idea came to him watching one of his own plays from the wings and concluding that the view from there was funnier. Copenhagen, in 1998, puts Niels Bohr, his wife Margrethe and Werner Heisenberg in an afterlife, going over and over their meeting in occupied Denmark in 1941 and what Heisenberg wanted from it - whether he was seeking absolution, information, or an agreement between physicists not to build the bomb. Nobody knows, including the two men, and the play makes the uncertainty its structure. It provoked a serious historical argument, and the Bohr family released his unsent draft letters in 2002 partly in response. Frayn has also published a dozen novels, including Headlong and Spies, and a book of philosophy, The Human Touch. He is married to the biographer Claire Tomalin. Noises Off has been revived continuously since 1982 and filmed once, badly, by his own account. He was awarded the Companion of Literature in 2019. His first career was as a humorous columnist and he has said the switch to plays was accidental.

• Lived: 1933 CE – ?
• Nationality: British
• Roles: writer