SOURCE: Blansfield, Karen C. “Michael Frayn and the World of Work.” South Atlantic Review 60, no. 4 (November 1995): 111-28.

In the following essay, Blansfield discusses the themes of work and professional life in Frayn's plays, concluding that Frayn's interest in these themes is based on “a perception of its crucial role in middle class life.”

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Michael Frayn once commented that seeing the plays of David Storey demonstrated to him “for the first time that the great world of work in which we all live could be represented on the stage” (Plays: One x-xi). That observation must have taken root, for many of Frayn's own plays concern people at work—including architects, journalists, actors, salesmen, librarians, and bureaucrats—and reveal how professions influence the characters' lives, both in and out of the office. Unlike Storey's characters, or those of other post-1956 playwrights, like Arnold Wesker, Frayn's characters aren't involved in physical...