A betrayal on a world stage

For a play about politicians, that most loquacious bunch, the most riveting moment in Michael Frayn’s “Democracy” is provided by a silent gesture.

Willy Brandt, the chancellor of West Germany, is making an unprecedented official visit to the Communist sector of his divided country at the height of the Cold War. This sets off a spontaneous outpouring of affection. To the great alarm of the repressive East German authorities, crowds break through police lines outside his hotel and begin to chant his name. Brandt comes to the window and raises his hand.

“What can he say that won’t pour petrol onto the flames?” asks Horst Emke, a Brandt cabinet minister, recalling the moment. “Silence. One of the greatest speeches of his career. Not a word. Just that one little gesture. ‘Calm down, calm down. Patience, patience. The time will come.’ ”

“Brandt did have some instinct for the public gesture,” Frayn says during a recent visit to New York. “He was a great speaker who chanted what he had to say, rather like a priest. This had a tremendous effect on an audience.”

“Democracy,” which opens Thursday on Broadway after runs in London and Berlin, deals with Brandt’s impact on his nation, his fractious cabinet and the world. As chancellor from 1969 to 1974, he challenged convention with his politically risky “Ostpolitik” -- a policy of reaching out to the hostile Communist East that would contribute to the fall of the Berlin Wall two decades later.

But that is just the backdrop to a more personal drama taking place as the play zeroes in on the loaded relationship Brandt has with a particular member of his inner circle: Gunter Guillaume, his unprepossessing assistant. Guillaume played the role of meek, loyal servant when he was actually an East German spy who worshiped Brandt even as he betrayed him.

The nexus of the political and the personal is nothing new for Frayn, whose 2000 Tony-winning drama “Copenhagen” was based on the mystery surrounding a 1941 meeting between two physicists who were simultaneously working on developing the atom bomb for opposing sides during World War II. As in “Democracy,” their personal relationship would have profound consequences. And in both plays, Frayn explores how uncertain and clouded those interactions can be. He has said that his premise, in both “Copenhagen” and “Democracy,” is that “human beings are kind of democracies within themselves” -- with internal debates and competing views that must eventually lead to practical behavior.

“I’ve always been interested in how people resolve the many different conflicts within themselves and the impact that has on their relationships,” he says. “And Guillaume and Brandt were more conflicted than most.”

The 71-year-old playwright, whose versatile and prolific output includes the classic farce “Noises Off,” exudes a professorial air in his blue shirt and corduroys. He exhibits the taciturnity he ascribes to Brandt in his play, slowly collecting his thoughts and careful to avoid any snap judgments or facile explanations. The era in German history that he deals with is generally thought to be one of peace, prosperity and what the playwright calls “dull respectability.” It was precisely that stolidity, coming out of the chaos of the demise of the Third Reich, that attracted Frayn.

“Democracy” explores the messy intersection of public good and private ego: lofty idealism, back-stabbing, compromise, political shell games and the inability to truly know human intent and motivation. “I think spying is a good metaphor for what all of us do all the time. We look at each other and try to judge each other’s feelings and motives,” Frayn has said.

While the play speeds along on the third rail provided by the real-life drama surrounding its two lead characters, it is the charismatic, volatile, womanizing Brandt (played by James Naughton) who commands the stage. While English audiences saw certain parallels to Prime Minister Tony Blair, Americans are likely to recognize shades of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. In fact, one of Brandt’s heroes was Kennedy. As mayor of Berlin at the time of Kennedy’s famous 1963 “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I am a Berliner”) speech, Brandt modeled the style of his administration after the New Frontier. “Camelot on the Rhine,” sniffs one of the cabinet ministers in “Democracy.”

Frayn cautions against pushing the comparisons too far. “They’re all really different people,” he says, then adds, “Brandt had that politician’s knack to make it seem as though he were speaking only to you, listening only to you.”

A mole in the chancellor’s office

In “Democracy,” Guillaume is among those most mesmerized by Brandt’s charm. The former photocopy shop manager and party worker, who serves as a symbol of the new government’s intent to listen to the “common people,” ends up as Brandt’s personal assistant at the Chancellery at Bonn. The discovery that the civil servant, played by Richard Thomas, was, in reality, an East German mole would eventually lead to Brandt’s downfall and Guillaume’s imprisonment. At the time, Frayn says, there was general astonishment that this self-effacing lump -- in the play, Brandt compares Guillaume to “meatballs cooked in fat” -- could be a political Judas.

“Brandt, in fact, had asked that he be replaced on a number of occasions. He found him too servile,” Frayn says, noting that it was inertia and Guillaume’s efficiency that probably kept him in place. Brandt died in 1992, but some of his surviving cabinet ministers who saw the play in its London or Berlin runs told Frayn that he had made Guillaume much more interesting than he actually was. Indeed, in “Democracy,” Guillaume describes his relationship to Brandt as that of Sancho Panza to Don Quixote -- cruising along the campaign trail together in an opulent private train once used by Hermann Goering, sharing jokes about East Germany as well as fine food and good wine. Later, when the topic of their collegial womanizing comes up, Guillaume’s handler, a composite character called Arno Kretschmann, offers a different literary allusion: Don Juan and Leporello.

“They said that he was really very dull,” Frayn recalls, “but I saw him interviewed on a television program after his release from prison, and he was a much shrewder and more intelligent figure than he had seemed in his persona in Bonn.”

Asked whether the entire experience of discovery and imprisonment may have accounted for the later change in Guillaume, Frayn reticently answers: “It’s impossible to know. I think he was changed by prison and the fact that he was now seriously ill with cancer. Or perhaps that servile, chubby-cheeked appearance that he had was just the part that he was playing.”

Frayn concedes that “Democracy” implies a deeper intimacy in the chancellor’s relationships -- particularly in the late-night conversations he has with Guillaume about their respective troubled youths -- than was the case. “People would complain that he was very distant,” Frayn recalls. “Despite the adoring crowds, [Brandt] was very lonely, which is probably what caused him to seek out women.”

Fascinating contradictions

The playwright is loath to speculate any further than that. Yet it’s clear why he was attracted to these historic figures. In Guillaume, Frayn has a character whose heroes are Brandt and Markus Wolf, the feared head of East German State Security. Brandt, on the other hand, is an indecisive man who could impulsively be moved to bold action. Faced with such fascinating contradictions, Frayn seems almost apologetic that he’s had to impose any embellishments for the sake of dramatic unity. “Everyone’s behavior is potentially inconsistent,” he says, “and it’s only when you place an interpretation on the behavior that a consistent pattern emerges.”

Frayn, however, assiduously avoids offering judgments on those patterns of behavior. He’s fond of quoting the German playwright Friedrich Hebbel, “In a play, everybody’s right.” “Democracy,” however, does take one uncompromising stance: the debate between opposing political systems. The West German parliamentary form of government is portrayed as a maddening “cacophony” of voices -- 11 parties screaming at one another, grabbing for power, forming and dissolving alliances with pragmatic ruthlessness. Its very looseness is a perennial source of anxiety for everybody, which makes Brandt’s motto of “to dare more democracy” fall on deaf ears. As Herbert Wehner, the crafty former communist and head of Brandt’s party, says in the play as he derides its star’s spontaneity, “Fine ... but spontaneity, like democracy, has to be held firmly in control.”

That Tower of Babel is in stunning contrast to the monotone of their Eastern neighbors, a frequency with which Guillaume is so in tune that he can ruthlessly betray a man whom he has grown to love. At one point, he is told by his handler, Arno, “At least we all speak with one single voice. We all sing the one same song. This is our strength. This is why we shall endure when this whole ramshackle structure finally comes tumbling down.”

Of course, it was East Germany’s house of cards that fell. And Frayn’s play celebrates that irony. “Absolutely,” says the playwright. “What is it that Churchill says [of democracy]? ‘It’s the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.’ ”

That bend in history, however, is well out of sight when Guillaume and Brandt play out their symbiotic drama. And it is when the cacophony of voices is stilled to a gesture in “Democracy” that the relationship between the two becomes most clarified. That happens when Guillaume accompanies Brandt to Warsaw in 1970. At the memorial for the Jewish victims of Nazi atrocities, Brandt’s famous spontaneity has global repercussions when, as the leader of West Germany, he impulsively drops to his knees. As the cameras and journalists record the historic moment -- tantamount, Frayn says, to “your George W. Bush kneeling at a memorial to the Iraqi war dead” -- Guillaume is at first shocked. “No, no, no! This time he’s gone too far!” he says to himself. Then the full import of the gesture hits him, the grace of a spontaneity that cannot be kept firmly under control.

“I wept, Arno,” he tells his handler.