Rise and fall of a flawed visionary

The political career of a compulsive adulterer, who regarded meeting the people as an opportunity for furtive sex and resigned after one of his closest aides was unmasked as a spy, has inspired Michael Frayn to shape an intriguing, psychological play about idealism at war with rough-house politics. Behind the scenes of Michael Blakemore's superbly acted production, politicians and their advisers are wittily revealed as the manipulators, cynics and hypocrites for whom we nowadays gladly reserve a special contempt.

But Democracy, which deals with Willy Brandt's remarkable reign from 1969-74 as a Leftish German Chancellor dependent upon Liberal support does not ridicule. It is never possessed by scenes of sex or smut.

There is not even a woman in the cast, though Frayn implies it was familiar practice for the odd female journalist to be laid on for Brandt in his sleeping-car when the Chancellor was on one of his tours to woo rather than screw the electorate that adored him. Frayn sees Brandt as a classic tragic hero, brought down by secret affairs. He depicts the Chancellor's cool, mildly contemptuous relationship with his nemesis, the obsequious East German spy Gunter Guillaume (Conleth Hill), who admired the man he was betraying and knew too much about his chief 's womanising. The Chancellor becomes a master of enigma variations. He wears the garb of gravitas and inscrutability in Roger Allam's tremendous performance which is suffused with desolate aloofness and repressed emotion.

Frayn says Democracy is fiction but the events are real and his characters behave as journalists and historians reported they did. Within this framework he offers a fascinating psychological explanation for the abject downfall of a Chancellor whose policy of reconciliation with the Soviet Union and East Germany gave him historic significance. People, Frayn argues, have within them the buried potentialities of what they could have been and often try to recover these lost, unfulfilled selves. Brandt's fatal indecisiveness, his vacillations, his reluctance to confront and appetite for brief encounters are attributable to his sense of never having a fixed or certain identity.

Yet Frayn's beautiful idea about the unrealised multiplicity of all human beings is stated and restated rather than dramatised: Frayn provides no scenes from Brandt's early years to help us understand him. He traces this Chancellor's rise and fall, often through G¸nter's limited perspective. The writing and staging are, though, models of compression. Peter J Davison's two-tier set, connected by a spiral staircase, leaves the upper area free for Brandt's public speeches. In the lower, which is filled with desks and pigeon-holes, David Ryall's gorgeously devious Wehner and Glyn Grain's ambitious Helmut Schmidt flourish.

A brilliantly non-realistic style permits the action to proceed in leaps and bounds: Gunter talks to Brandt in his office while delivering asides and questions to Steven Pacey as his sinister East German controller sitting on the sidelines. This unhappily married spy, who wants Brandt to succeed, is supposed to merge blandly into any background. But Hill makes Guillaume so distractingly ostentatious, with waggling shoulders, histrionic voice, elbows folded, stomach thrust forward, hands flapping, swivelling pelvis and head tilted, that he becomes far more aid to camp than aide-de-camp. This enraging performance distorts and spoils Frayn's engrossing portrayal of a flawed, political visionary.

Democracy