Michael Frayn was a spectacularly unsuccessful playwright.

The Cambridge Footlights has for years provided British comedy with a litany of its brightest stars, from the Monty Python team to Fry and Laurie. In his final year at Cambridge, Frayn got the opportunity to write most of the Footlights annual Spring Revue.

Normally, the Revue is full of topical satire on current affairs, showbiz and the media, and transfers to the West End. Frayn decided to take an original approach and, heavily influenced by a play he had seen in London, he set about writing a more austere kind of comedy. As he recalls in his collection of essays, ‘Stage Directions’, “the humour was to be entirely abstract.”
Frayn’s approach may have been brave, but it wasn’t funny. His was the first Revue not to transfer to the West End, and he didn’t write for the stage again for 15 years.

In the meantime, he became a journalist, and was soon a leading humorist in the pages of the Observer and the Guardian. He tried his hand at fiction: his early novel, ‘Towards the End of the Morning’, is a hilarious study of Fleet Street in decline.

Then, he was asked to write a short play, for an evening of plays about marriage. The show was to be produced by a leading New York producer, and Frayn wrote a simple, comic piece about a young couple on holidays with their baby.

The producer refused to stage it. It was “filthy”, he said: he could never produce a play that featured a baby’s nappy being changed on stage.

Frayn persisted. He wrote a couple of accompanying short plays, and they were staged together. On opening night, there was catcalling and heckling from the gallery. Going round to the stage door afterwards, Frayn passed three young men leaving the theatre. “That’s him,” one said, and they turned after him. “Load of blood rubbish,” another shouted. The critics largely agreed.

Still, the audiences liked it. It ran for six months, and Frayn was encouraged. He followed up with two new, full-length plays. The first was a flop. The second, called ‘The Sandboy’, opened during a dispute in the newspaper business. Only one paper, the Times, sent a critic. He hated it. The review was “a shattering dismissal”, recalls Frayn.

A few years later, he took ‘The Sandboy’ out again, and reworked the story, calling it ‘Up’. This time, he failed even to get it produced.

But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with Frayn already in his 40s, his luck turned. He wrote a farce, ‘Noises Off’, about a second-rate theatre company putting on a third-rate farce. It ran for five years on the West End and became one of the most popular plays on the amateur circuit.

Then he took the script for ‘Up’ out again, and had a third go at it. He called the new play ‘Benefactors’. As the title suggests, it was about people doing good – to each other, and to society at large.

In it, David, an architect, is married to Jane, an anthropologist. David wins a commission for a massive new public-housing scheme, to involve tearing down a run-down area of council housing and replacing it with modern, high-density housing. Across the road from David and Jane live Colin, a journalist and cynic, and Sheila, a mess. Their lives all become intertwined with the housing project and, as David’s scheme rises and falls, their relationship follows a similarly troubled, but more complicated, path.

It was a complicated story, attempting to enmesh big ideas about social progress and the welfare state in a play with some of the contours of a farce, full of quick entrances from the side, and misunderstandings between middle-class couples. The first read-through with the cast was unpromising: “the whole complex structure that I thought I had created seemed to have shrivelled to dust as its first exposure to the air,” Frayn writes. He had a moment of panic, but held his nerve, and the play progressed through rehearsals to the night of the first preview.

That night, there was another freak public event – Frayn doesn’t recall what precisely – and the theatre was almost empty. The play “seemed suddenly lost and tiny in all that space,” he writes. Failure beckoned, again.

But when an audience did come, they liked it, and so did the critics. ‘Benefactors’ transferred to the West End; three months later, his adaptation of Chekhov, ‘Wild Honey’, opened to rave reviews. With ‘Noises Off’ still running, Frayn suddenly had three hit plays on the West End at the same time.

(On Thursday, ‘Benefactors’ opens in Dublin, at the Samuel Beckett Centre, produced by b*spoke theatre company and directed by Lynne Parker. Tickets from (01) 896 2461 or see www.tcd.ie/drama.)

From his genesis as a humorist, Frayn became one of the leading political playwrights of the age. In his later plays, ‘Copenhagen’ and ‘Democracy’, he subjected real events of recent history to dramatic interrogation, and demonstrated an extraordinary ability to take abstract ideas – of science and of politics – and not merely make them tangible and accessible, but weave gripping, entertaining drama around them.

Frayn never lost his interest in the abstract; he simply learned how to make it dramatic, and funny.

Written for my Saturday column in the Irish Independent.