The Heart of the Matter

About the author:
Michael Frayn's Democracy is Michael Cumpsty's twelfth Broadway show. Most recently he won acclaim as Mellersh Wilton in Enchanted April, Julian Marsh in the revival of 42nd Street and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen another Frayn play directed by Michael Blakemore. In his time off from the Great White Way, Cumpsty has appeared on film in The 24 Hour Woman, The Ice Storm and Fatal Instinct. Here, Cumpsty explains how Michael Frayn's plays tap into the humanity, not just the intellect, of a character.

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Acting in the Michael Frayn plays Democracy and Copenhagen, both directed by Michael Blakemore, has been fantastically challenging and stimulating for me. These are both stunningly smart plays. You can feel that Michael Frayn surrendered himself completely to the world he was writing about. In Democracy, the raw material is German politics, in Copenhagen, physics. They're like big brainy jigsaw puzzles. But they also have enormous heart. I've come to believe that in both cases my greatest responsibility as an actor is to help reveal the heart. I think the brain pretty much takes care of itself.

Before we started rehearsals for Copenhagen, I read a lot about Werner Heisenberg, a German nuclear physicist from the 1930s, and the character I was to play. The big question about him is: Did he do everything he possibly could to produce the atomic bomb for Hitler? His detractors say yes, he did try his utmost; despite his brilliance, he just couldn't figure it out. People more sympathetic to him say he either didn't allow himself to see the key to the problem, or that he deliberately stalled the work to prevent the Nazis from getting the bomb. Either way, scientists and historians have debated these issues since the Second World War.

In trying to understand these different positions about Heisenberg, I read opinions on both sides, and tried to understand some tiny amount of the science involved. I have to admit that it was challenging and intimidating, and it was very stimulating. But I wondered if the subject matter was going to be dramatic and accessible for an audience hearing the play for the first time.

Then as soon as we started rehearsal, I realized something about the play that I'd missed on first reading it. I don't mean this as a detraction at all, but elements of Copenhagen are like a great big glorious soap opera. The characters Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe, and Heisenberg who was like an adopted son to Bohr, are tied up in a triangle of love and loathing and dependence and distrust and recrimination. They yearn to be able to understand what went wrong with--and to share again the joys of--their past relationships in the days before the Nazis and the war. And in the end, it's this human heart of the play, more than the science and the history, which makes it work as theater and makes it, in my opinion, a very great play.

And Frayn being Frayn, the same sorts of things are going on in Democracy. On the surface level, this play seems to be about West German politics in the early 1970s. The characters are all based on actual people and the events are "true." But like Copenhagen, this play is really about relationships. It's about devotion and trust and subversion and betrayal, about conflicting interests and motivations. And at the deepest level, Democracy is about these conflicts actually existing within each of us, as much as they do between us. Who are we deep down, and what do we want? And how do we know? You can trust Frayn to go for the big questions.

In the early days of our rehearsals for Democracy, I wasn't sure how to approach my character. Like everyone in Democracy, my character, Arno Kretschmann, is a mass of contradictions. He believes in the principles of communism. He believes that potentially at least the communist state will be more humane than the capitalist. But he clearly much prefers living in a western city than in communist East Berlin. His job is to be the controller of Gunter Guilluame, the communist spy working at the right hand of the West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt. But in fact they aren't working to subvert Brandt. They're actually doing everything they can to "keep him on his feet", as I say at one point. And by the end of the play, when the whole East German communist state has collapsed, my character doesn't seem to mind at all. This, though, is not because Michael Frayn has written an inconsistent character, but because he's written characters that are all too human in their seething inconsistencies and contradictions. As Brandt says towards the end of Democracy: "So many people, with so many different views and so many different voices. And inside each of us so many more people still, all struggling to be heard."

So at first I figured, here I'm playing a communist spy. I guess he's a bad guy. Let's be a little arch and hooded, and observe it all in a sinister fashion from the sidelines. And then Michael Blakemore gave me the greatest note. He suggested I let the character be idealistic, and let him have as intense a personal investment in the action of the play as possible. And I realized again that this is the key to these Michael Frayn plays. Perhaps the key to all good plays. No matter how much potentially intimidating intellect there may be in the writing, the key to discovering the richness of the plays is to find the characters' humanity, their emotional investment and their passion. Their heart. And of course, that's the way to engage the audience as well.