✭✭✭✭✩

by Michael Frayn, directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

March 5-April 6, 2008

Michael Frayn’s 2003 play Democracy, a rich, complex study of spying in the former West Germany, is now receiving its Toronto premiere in a splendid, high-voltage production with a top notch cast.  Frayn was able to turn quantum physics into the international hit Copenhagen in 1998.  This time he turns his remarkably penetrating insight to West German politics in the 1970s to create a fascinating multilevelled story of trust and betrayal.      

     

On the simplest level we follow the reports of the East German spy Günter Guillaume (Alon Nashman), who rises through the ranks of the Social Democratic Party to become the personal assistant of charismatic chancellor Willy Brandt (RH Thomson) from Brandt’s rise in 1969 to his fall in 1974.  Guillaume’s assignment is to report to his contact (Alex Poch-Goldin) all information pertaining to Brandt’s policy of Ostpolitik, or rapprochement with East Germany and the Eastern bloc in general.  This policy won Brandt the Nobel Prize in 1971 but also alienated members of his own party who thought the capitalist West should have nothing to do with the Communist East.  Consequently, we discover that Guillaume is not the only one spying on Brandt and that, paradoxically, Guillaume’s motives are more benign than those of the others.  On another level, we follow Guillaume’s growing sense of identification with Brandt and Brandt’s with the supposedly “ordinary” Guillaume.

Spying also takes on a metaphorical dimension.  Brandt himself in escaping Nazism, became a spy with numerous identities, and now longs to find the person he once was before life forced him to wear an ever-changing series of masks.  It soon is clear that everyone in politics is not really who he seems and ultimately all people, political or not, have a covert identity they shield with their public persona.

Tarragon has assembled a flawless 10-man cast for the show, and director Richard Rose moved the action along in such an ultra-precise rapid-fire pace that you can’t afford to miss a word.  Thomson gives one of his finest performances as the idealistic but inwardly torn Brandt constantly searching for the ordinary man he might have been even as he reaches the height of power.  Nashman has the wonderful ability of conveying Guillaume’s essential innocence, despite his vocation, that leaves him open to manipulation by others.  Graham Harley is superb as the party leader Herbert Wehner, whose mask of sullenness hides a deeper layer of malevolent cynicism that undermines the whole notion of democracy.  Charlotte Dean’s set unfortunately evokes more the drabness of the East rather than the affluence of the West where the action is set.  Despite this, its rare to find a politic drama filled with such insight into the workings not just of a particular government at a crucial period in world politics but into politics and human nature in general.  This is a production not to be missed.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-03-05.

Photo: Nigel Hamer, R.H. Thompson, Garaham Harley, Alon Nashman and C. David Johnson. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.