About the work
Democracy is a play by the British writer Michael Frayn, which premiered on 9 September 2003 at the Royal National Theatre in London. As with Copenhagen, it was directed by Michael Blakemore, with Roger Allam as Willy Brandt and Conleth Hill as Günter Guillaume. The play reconstructs Willy Brandt's chancellorship (1969–1974) and its end after his personal aide Guillaume was exposed as a Stasi agent.
Plot
Starting from Brandt's election as chancellor, the play traces how the ardent Guillaume works his way into Brandt's inner circle as a trusted aide while secretly reporting to the East German leadership. Frayn interweaves the personal closeness between chancellor and spy with the larger question of how much openness a democracy can afford without being undermined by its own opponents, framing Brandt's 1974 resignation as the price of that ambivalence.
Cultural significance
Democracy won the Evening Standard Award and the Critics' Circle Award for Best Play and transferred to Broadway in 2004. As in Copenhagen, Frayn combines meticulously researched recent history with a kind of experiment on the limits of knowledge – here not of physics, but of political trust.