Rebecca Fraser Daniel Howe Pocket Playhouse by Michael

BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE

Pocket Playhouse: Thirty-six Short Entertainments By Michael Frayn Faber and Faber £12.99 Oldie price £10.04 inc p&p

Back in the early 1960s, Michael Frayn made his name with satirical columns he wrote for the Guardian and published as The Day of the Dog and The Book of Fub.

Then his targets were very much of the period: advertising and PR men, Carnaby Street, and the likes of Chris Smoothe, Minister of Chance and Speculation. And now here he is, fifty years later, author of some of our time’s finest plays and novels, cheerfully updating his old shooting gallery. Phone mazes, password lunacies, celebrity mania, sponsorship, even those living statues that hang in the air disguised as Mrs Thatcher or Superman: all and more get a peppering from the veteran Frayn in his Pocket Playhouse.

This collection of 36 monologues and duologues comes in the same Lilliputian form as the batch of sketches Frayn called Matchbox Theatre, but is more obviously meant to be read than staged. It is at full comic throttle from the start. After a parody of the over-elaborate instructions that make assembling DIY kits so daunting, Frayn goes on to reduce heritage tours through London to nonsense:

‘On our left, the Houses of Parliament. “Big Ben” is not the name of the tower, as most people believe – it’s the man who sells T-shirts outside. The clocktower is actually called Tiny Tim and figures in TV adaptations of Dickens’s much-loved classic Little Nell. It’s interesting to note that most MPS have been convicted of offences of one sort of or another and attend the House on day release as part of an imaginative back-to-work scheme.’

Nonsense but pointed nonsense. Likewise with Charles Chedworth, just knighted for services to business and international relations, who modestly says that all he did was ‘keep the UK tax avoidance industry on its feet’. Likewise with a commentary on the National Tv-watching Championships – ‘Dawn Dreem there warming up with a few yawns, Bob Scrum opening and closing his eyes, Norris Ogg being given lastminute massage on his bottom in preparation for the gruelling five days ahead’ – and those theatre directors who twist perfectly good plays into preposterous shapes.

As the author of some fifteen plays himself, Frayn clearly isn’t taken with the kind of madness that sets School for Scandal in a school of dolphins or Gammer Gurton’s Needle in Afghanistan, or stages a teenage King Lear or a Nazi Puss in Boots. ‘Blue skies thinking, please,’ cries the director of a new play, and gets it when a team member suggests he stages it ‘as written’. He’s appalled, only to change his mind when he realises this is the far-out idea he’s asked for. And Frayn has made his point and his protest.

There’s plenty of variety here. Now Frayn is parodying elderly forgetfulness, now whimsically imagining two Gainsboroughs in the National Gallery sneering at the punters gawping at them, now playing erudite games with the idea of a Cartesian Theatre, and now becoming wonderfully silly.

There are times when the author of the hilarious Noises Off and Skios might be paying an advance visit to some

second childhood and happily splashing about in its lunacies.

Again and again, he pushes comic ideas to their farcical limits and beyond. The chic new restaurant, Hell’s Kitchen, isn’t just noisy: its menus start with ‘a feuillette of pneumatic drill, served in bite-sized, three-minute bursts on a bed of lightly sprayed asphalt, matured concrete and robust roadstone’, and end up offering Delice Écossaise, which is ‘a London-edinburgh express passing through Grantham Station at 120 mph’. A Victorian obituary of the legendary creator of much-loved hymns gradually becomes more contemporary. Brahms cables that the Rev Francis Giffard-smith was ‘the Daddy of us all’. He himself and his backing group once trashed a medieval rood screen. And he’d sometimes pound organ keyboards to destruction ‘while screaming women worshippers threw their flannel knickers and whalebone corsets at him’.

That’s my favourite item, but there’s plenty of competition. I’ve half a mind to call Frayn a National Treasure, but I can imagine him squirming at that most irritating of modern labels.