In an
Observer article (8 December 1985), following the news that
Benefactors had won the Play of the Year Award from the Society of West End Theatre, Frayn reflected on some of the moments that had given him the most pleasure in the theater. His selection places him securely in a mainstream comic tradition. Included are the end of the first scene of Christopher Hampton's
The Philanthropist (1970) and the moment when the child unexpectedly gets out of her wheelchair in Peter Nichols's
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967). "If I had sat in a box at the
Norman Conquests or
Absurd Person Singular I should certainly have fallen out of it," Frayn said of Ayckbourn's 1972 and 1973 comedies.
Frayn was born in Mill Hill, in northwest London, on 8 September 1933. His father, Thomas Allen Frayn, was a sales representative for an asbestos company, and his mother, Violet Alice Frayn, née Lawson, had worked as a shop assistant. The family moved to Ewell, Surrey, when Frayn was eighteen months old. He attended Sutton High School and then Kingston Grammar School. On leaving school, he performed his two years' national service in the army from 1952 to 1954, during which he was sent to a Russian interpreters' course at the University of Cambridge before becoming an officer in the intelligence corps.
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