Michael Frayn interview

In The Times, Benedict Nightingale talks to Michael Frayn about his new play, Afterlife, that opens at the National Theatre next month.

The subject this time is Max Reinhardt, the pioneering theatre producer who also renovated the Baroque palace in Salzberg where movers and shakers now meet to debate world affairs and, bizarrely, much of The Sound of Music was shot. Afterlife itself doesn't open until June 10, but Frayn has just published his intro to the play in a collection of theatre essays called Stage Directions; and there he cites descriptions galore of Reinhardt. He was convivial, withdrawn, bountiful, hypersensitive, courageous, fearful, quarrelsome, kindly, indecisive, bold, the Jew who refused Hitler's offer of rebirth as an Aryan - and, as all this and more, a worthy Frayn protagonist.