Michael Frayn

The playwright and novelist Michael Frayn shares his musical passions with Michael Berkeley.

Michael Frayn is an acute observer of the absurdities and pain of the human condition, and his writing career has spanned journalism, novels, philosophy, Russian translation, and plays both philosophical and farcical. Noises Off, his 1982 farce about a farce, has become one of the twentieth century's best loved and most successful plays and is frequently described as the funniest farce ever written. Equally praised have been his philosophical plays such as Copenhagen and Democracy.

He tells Michael about his childhood in Surrey, which partly inspired his award-winning novel Spies, his time in the army learning Russian, and the pain and pleasure of farce - the most technically demanding of all literary forms.

And he shares his lifelong love of classical music, choosing pieces by Beethoven, Prokofiev, Mozart, Mahler, and Brahms - and a piece by his late mother-in-law Muriel Herbert.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.