Michael Frayn

After inaugurating his longstanding collaboration with director Michael Blakemore on "Make and Break" (1980), Frayn reteamed with Blakemore on the wonderful back-stage farce "Noises Off" (1982), called by Frank Rich, the former chief drama critic of The New York Times: "The single funniest play I ever saw on the job." Featuring a puerile play-within-a-play sex comedy entitled "Nothing On" and a cast of mediocre British actors on tour in the provinces, "Noises Off" sends up those calamitous (yet engaging) nights in the theater and the real-life illicit love triangles, paralleling those in "Nothing On," that can wreak havoc on a company. The wild romp earned Frayn his first Tony nomination, and he and Blakemore returned to Broadway in 1986 with "Benefactors," a much different kettle of fish which brought him a second Tony nod. A comedy only in the darkest sense, it confirmed the author's contention that "my works are about an ordered world breaking down into disorder." In "Benefactors," marriages and principles are the casualties when the idealized order of modern liberal society comes apart at the seems.Undaunted by the failures of "Look, Look," which closed after only 27 London performances in 1990, and "Now You Know," which toured the United Kingdom but failed to make it to the West End, Frayn embarked on arguably his most cerebral play, "Copenhagen" (1998), doing for German physicist Werner Heisenberg's Principle what Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" had done for Chaos Theory. "Copenhagen" investigates the unreliability of memory, the ambiguity of human motives and the conflicting loyalties of scientists in wartime by imagining what happened at the famous meeting in 1941 between Heisenberg, who was working for the Nazis at the time, and Neils Bohr, the half-Jewish Danish physicist who had mentored him before the war. Despite demanding an audience to sit up and pay attention, the play directed by Blakemore was a surprise hit in the West End and earned Frayn another Tony nomination when it debuted on Broadway with a completely different cast. Simultaneously, "Headlong," his clever novel about a man who thinks he has found a missing Brueghel in the home of an acquaintance and schemes to acquire it for himself, was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize.