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HANS-DIETRICH GENSCHER, Minister of the Interior: We shove the old left off the raft before it sinks under their weight, and as soon as the new left see it's afloat they all scramble aboard and sink it again. . . . Then the next item on the news is that our chancellor is in East Germany having some kind of love-in with the Communists.

HORST EHMKE, Chancellor Willy Brandt's chief of staff: The Communists? What have the Communists to do with the left?

— from Democracy, by Michael Frayn

Somehow cell phones and Michael Frayn don't go together, but as he sits on a park bench in, or on, Richmond Green, outside his house in North London, it's over a cell phone that he says: "All politics is very complex. It's all about decisions, isn't it? — decisions involving millions of people. 'I get the cake.' 'I get the cake.' By the time you share it, you've smashed the cake."

"Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee?" the thought is ventured from New York.

"Exactly."

Democracy — the London triumph now at the Brooks Atkinson, directed by Michael Blakemore with a killer cast headed by James Naughton as Willy Brandt and Richard Thomas as Günter Guillaume, the oleaginous aide whose exposure as an East German spy sealed Brandt's 1974 downfall — is as complex, sophisticated and subtle a piece of theatre as, well, Copenhagen or that lunatic farce Noises Off, both by Michael Frayn. (Noises Off wasn't subtle unless you had to write it — "and," says the playwright, "rewrite it many, many times.")

Frayn the journalist fell in love with postwar Germany when he was there to do some articles during the Willy Brandt era of the early 1970's. The tragedy of Brandt, charismatic peace-forger between West and East brought down by his own vulnerabilities — wine, womanizing, abstractness, star quality, unwillingness to come to grips — plus the accident of Günter Guillaume, stayed in Frayn's head over the years as "a very moving story, really."

It can also be seen as a love story of sorts — "at least from Guillaume's side," says Frayn. Brandt despised Guillaume from the outset, considered him a "Berlin meatball" cooked in fat, and ordered his chief of staff to get rid of him, but in the end found Guillaume indispensable — this never sleeping campaign-train scheduler, whistle-stop local-information source, clean-shirt-and-tie supplier — and took him, on vacation, into the Brandt family, such as it was. Guillaume fell hard for the hero he was betraying, the kind of love Iago had for Othello. Indeed the irony went deeper: "Guillaume was spying on Brandt. Brandt was spying on Guillaume."

The British press and critics have, of course, struck a parallel between the Willy Brandt of this drama and the Tony Blair of real, immediate life, but then you come to an instant in the play when Brandt, musing about women, says to fellow mortal Guillaume: "The way they look at you. The way they look straight into your eyes and you look straight into theirs. The way you can't understand them. The way you can" — and suddenly, if one is an American, one thinks of a particular countryman who, when asked not long ago why he'd done what he did with a young woman, replied, after a pause: "Because I could."

Michael Frayn agrees. "Yes, I see some parallels between Brandt and Clinton." But he didn't write the play for that reason, or the Tony Blair reason, either.

"Brandt had what the Germans call Konfliktscheu," said Frayn, spelling it out over the phone. "Means someone who doesn't like confrontation and is very indecisive. Whereas politicians have to confront problems and make decisions 120 times a day."

Willy Brandt had another problem, not unfamiliar to many others in the same boat. He might not have resigned, he said, if only he hadn't given up smoking.

"What have I done with my life, Günter?" he says as the polls are zooming downward. "Moved on, moved on. Adapted, adapted . . . Shed my skins, one after another, like a snake." [His name at birth, in Lübeck, Germany, was Herbert Frahm. In his youth, off in Norway during the Hitler years, he went from one false name and persona to another to another to another.] "And where do I end up? On a train, traveling from nowhere to nowhere, to no point or purpose, making my confession to Pastor Nobody."

That, by the way, is writing. As well as a pretty good précis of the political life.

Among all else, including a number of novels, Michael Frayn is a valued translator of Chekhov. In the closing moments of Democracy, Willy Brandt, out of power, has lived to see the two Germanys, East and West, made one, the long-delayed victory of his Ostpolitik — "his love-in with the Communists," as Herr Genscher, Minister of the Interior, contemptuously puts it earlier in the play. Brandt hears — we in the theatre hear — the thud of a single pickax, then of another and another, clearing the rubble of collapsed masonry as destroyed Germany rebuilds itself. Well, there's a play called The Cherry Orchard that ends with the chunk-chunk-chunk of an ax.

"Why yes!" says Michael Frayn, there on his bench on Richmond Green. "Yes, I think I must have thought about that. Yes, The Cherry Orchard does end that way. After the terrible thing has happened, after they've lost the estate, they all cheer up."

In a great movie called Rules of the Game, by a great director named Jean Renoir, a character says: "The terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons." Which echoes what Frayn has always kept in mind, a precept learned from several great playwrights before him: "In a good play, everyone is right."

Democracy is a good play. Even Günter Guillaume is right.