Лучшие книги Майкла Фрейна

Лондонское предместье, начало 1940-x. Два мальчика играют в войну. Вообразив, что мать одного из них - немецкая шпионка, они начинают следить за каждым ее шагом. Однако невинная, казалось бы, детская игра неожиданно приобретает зловещий поворот... А через 60 лет эту историю - уже под другим углом зрения, с другим пониманием событий - вспоминает постаревший герой. Майкл Фрейн (р. 1933), известный английский писатель и драматург, переводчик пьес А. П. Чехова, демонстрирует в романе "Шпионы" незаурядное мастерство психологической нюансировки. Это тонкая проза, главное в которой - сложная игра восприятий; образ реальности складывается здесь…

Майкл Фрейн - современный английский писатель старшего поколения - получил известность как романист, драматург и переводчик русской классической литературы. Роман "Одержимый" - это забавный рассказ об опасных и захватывающих приключениях ученого-искусствоведа, напавшего на след неизвестной картины Брейгеля. Искушенный призраком славы, главный герой книги задумывает головокружительную махинацию с целью завладеть бесценным произведением искусства. Приключения современного афериста (в книге есть все необходимые составляющие детектива: тайна, погони, стрельба, ускользающая добыча) переплетаются с событиями жизни еретика Брейгеля, творившего под…

Тhe Tony Award—winning play that soars at the intersection of science and art, Copenhagen is an explosive re-imagining of the mysterious wartime meeting between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb. In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a clandestine trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart and friend Niels Bohr. Their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle had revolutionized atomic physics. But now the world had changed and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war. Why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen and what he wanted to say to Bohr are questions that have vexed…

«Шум за сценой» — самая известная и популярная комедия Майкла Фрейна впервые была поставлена в Лондоне в 1982 г. Годом позже состоялась бродвейская премьера и с тех пор вот уже четверть века пьеса не сходит со сцен театров по обе стороны Атлантики. Спектакль на сцене театра им. Моссовета — возобновление постановки, которая была осуществлена в 1987 г. режиссёром Инной Данкман и имела большой успех у зрителя.
Для сценического успеха пьеса даёт веские основания. Здесь с блеском применяется открытый еще в шекспировские времена прием «театра в театре», когда реальность и вымысел переплетаются в череде забавных недоразумений. Артисты сборной труппы репетируют рекламирующий сардины спектакль, чтобы в дальнейшем прокатать его «чёсом» по провинциальным городам. Две жизненные ипостаси — реальная и сценическая — для каждого персонажа сплетаются в один клубок, доводя действие спектакля до комического абсурда и сатирического гротеска.

В литературу Майкл Фрейн, английский писатель, драматург и переводчик, вошел поначалу как романист. В его первом романе «Оловянные солдатики» объектом сатирического запала стали компьютеры, создающие литературные произведения.

В 1966 году за «Оловянные солдатики» Фрейну была присуждена премия Сомерсета Моэма.

Michael Frayn's first novel for over fifteen years is a witty and playful account of what it's like to be on the fringes of the creative process. It is written in the form of a series of letters sent by a minor English Literature academic to his old friend in Australia.

1937 год. Журналист Кочетов - "империалистическая акула пера" из России - приезжает в Государственный Дом отдыха писателей Советской Социалистической Республики Великобритании, чтобы взять интервью у крупнейшего английского писателя.
Да-да, в здесь нет ошибки: в пьесе английского писателя и журналиста Майкла Фрейна, революция 1917 года произошла не в России, а в Великобритании...

On the sunlit Greek island of Skios, the Fred Toppler Foundation's annual lecture is to be given by Dr Norman Wilfred, the world-famous authority on the scientific organisation of science. He turns out to be surprisingly young and charming -- not at all the intimidating figure they had been expecting. The Foundation's guests are soon eating out of his hand. So, even sooner, is Nikki, the attractive and efficient organiser.

Meanwhile, in a remote villa at the other end of the island, Nikki's old school-friend Georgie waits for the notorious chancer she has rashly agreed to go on holiday with, and who has only too characteristically failed to turn up. Trapped in the villa with her, by an unfortunate chain of misadventure, is a balding old gent called Dr Norman Wilfred, who has lost his whereabouts, his luggage, his temper and increasingly all normal sense of reality -- everything he possesses apart from the flyblown text of a well-travelled lecture on the scientific organisation of science...

This tale is set in the crossword and nature-notes department of an obscure national newspaper during the declining years of Fleet Street.

John Garrard is a successful manufacturer who is driven by a compulsion to use and consume the world and the people around him. He is briefly intensely curious about everything he comes across, particularly other people's worlds: their religious beliefs, their sexual and artistic yearnings and their feelings about him. During one climactic night amid the hectic activities of a trade fair in Germany, it looks as if he will be forced to turn his sharp eyes upon himself and come face to face at last with silence and darkness.

Heaven, reported St John in Revelation, was a cubical city 12,000 furlongs high made of 'pure gold, like unto clear glass'. That was 1,900 years ago, and Heaven as it is today has changed out of all recognition. This book is the account of a recent journey to the metropolis at the nerve-centre of the universe. The journey was undertaken not by a mystical reporter like St John, but by Howard Baker, an observer of much more modern outlook. He finds a city which offers rich opportunities for leisure and enjoyment - but one which also presents a moral and intellectual challenge. In short, a city which is highly adapted to the requirements of modest, responsible, likeable, educated men of liberal views and genuine social concern called Howard Baker.

'Lucid, intelligent, delightful, stylish, extremely funny . . . I recommend it wholeheartedly.' New York Times

'May go down in history as one of England's special contributions to the twentieth century.' Times Literary Supplement

'An unknown place.' This was what Michael Frayn's children called the shadowy landscape of the past from which their family had emerged. In this book he sets out to rediscover that lost land before all trace of it finally disappears beyond recall. As he tries to see it through the eyes his parents and the others who shaped his life, he comes to realise how little he ever knew or understood about them.

This is above all the story of his father, the quick-witted boy from a poor and struggling family, who overcame so many disadvantages and shouldered so many burdens to make a go of his life; who found happiness, had it snatched away from him in a single instant, and in the end, after many difficulties, perhaps found it again.

Father and son were in some odd ways ridiculously alike, in others ridiculously different; and the journey back down the corridors of time is sometimes comic, sometimes painful, as Michael Frayn comes to see how much he has inherited from his father - and makes one or two surprising discoveries about both of them along the way . .

Twenty years after graduation, six former students return to their college for a reunion dinner in this late 1970s riotous farce which takes on the ridiculousness of English propriety. Seeing the reunion as a chance to escape the tedium of family and working life, the group seizes the opportunity for drunken buffoonery and to reminisce about – and relive – their jaunty college days in stuffy, middle-class, white, male Oxbridge college. In classic bedroom farce form, the group gets locked into the college overnight with the much-desired head master's wife and a cabinet minister. They and their high profile guests are flung into one embarrassing situation after another as they chase in and out of multiple bedroom doors, some in their underwear, with misunderstandings and mistaken identities- all the staples of classic farce. Frayn's extraordinary repartee raises the genre to new heights of wit and subtly as the group comedically ponders their varying degrees of success and the role of predestination and free-will in their life choices.

One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, winner of the Tony Award for best play in 1999, Frayn was presented with a curious package from a London housewife that contained a few faded pages of barely legible German. These pages, apparently found concealed beneath some floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of the play. While Frayn began to lose all sense of certainty, actor David Burke, who played Niels Bohr in the London production and had some experience with documents of this sort, followed the action with particularly close interest. After the riddle was cracked and the fog had cleared, Frayn and Burke sat down together to ponder the winding trail of the Copenhagen papers.

By turns comic and profound, The Copenhagen Papers explores the conundrum at the heart of all Michael Frayn's work--human fallibility and the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

Комедия в одном действии

When a mercurial Moscow blonde and a visiting British businessman conduct an affair through their Russian interpreter it reveals all the deceptions of love and East-West relations.