Beautiful Democracy

What a rare brand of theatrical excitement Michael Frayn generates in this beautiful, awardwinning play of his.

Fresh from the National, galvanised by a cascade of superlative performances in Michael Blakemore's finely articulated production, Democracy gives the West End a touch of intellectual class. For the play does an unusual theatrical thing.

It jolts your settled mental assumptions. It invites you to think rather than just to feel.

On the surface the play is a simple spy drama. Frayn suggests why and how an obscure East German called Gunter Guillaume, wangled a menial post in the private office of Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, and proceeded to spy upon him.

Frayn makes the spying process vivid by placing Guillaume's spymaster, in a seat on the periphery of the highly stylised action.

Conleth Hill's Guillaume maintains an almost running conversation with his controller as he loiters on spying business in Brandt's office: Peter J Davison's over literal and limiting set - a two tiered office full of pigeonholes - is ill-suited to external scenes.

Frayn captures a strong, comic sense of the compromises, contrivances and informal coalitions required of any centre-Left party in power, but lacking an overall majority.

Parallels are wittily drawn between the troubles of Brandt's precarious administration and those of prime ministers Wilson and Callaghan in the Seventies and even the Blair regime. Roger Allam's mesmerising Brandt - a witty, graceful enigma wrapped in several conundrums - broods in vigilant melancholia and chronic indecisiveness over a political scene rife with in-fighting.

Wonderful David Ryall, as the Social Democratic Party's master of reactionary opportunism and Brandt's wily, underhand enemy, oozes avuncular charm and a political cynicism at odds with Brandt's idealism.

Yet there is no conventional plotting or development. Brandt's political tribulations run in tandem with Guillaume's minor spying escapades, while the net slowly closes in upon him.

The production's nagging defect is Hill's distractingly, scene-stealing Guillaume. Playing a man who melted into the background, Hill keeps thrusting his overpitched voice and twitching, restless body parts into the limelight.

The unusual fascination of the play is generated by Brandt's reiterated belief that our personalities are neither fixed nor certain: we could, if fate had so disposed, have led a host of different lives and become many different people.