Interview - The playwright Michael Frayn is a man of contradictions - and that is the key to his art, argues David Smith

"Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then, I contradict myself; / (I am large - I contain multitudes.)" Walt Whitman's benign licence for doublethink resurfaced in 2003 in Michael Frayn's play Democracy, quoted by the German chancellor Willy Brandt. It is a sentiment with which Frayn himself clearly identifies. He achieved fame with comic novels and plays such as Noises Off (1982), a farce about regional theatre, but his two most recent stage successes have been intellectual dramas about physics (Copenhagen, 1998) and postwar German politics (Democracy). Frayn has devoted his career to philosophy and culture, yet he questions their social value. His attitude to British politics is similarly ambivalent.

Copenhagen reimagined the mysterious 1941 meeting between the German scientist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish mentor, Niels Bohr. It sliced through the knottiest concepts of atomic physics with diamond-like precision, winning Evening Standard and Tony Awards. Democracy, about Willy Brandt's betrayal by the Stasi spy Günter Guillaume, seemed an even tougher sell, yet it nailed the compromises of daily politics to dazzling effect.

So why has this behemoth intellect now returned to Donkey's Years, a 1976 farce in which six graduates return to their university college after 25 years for a reunion dinner? Frayn has rewritten the play, cutting three acts down to two because "nowadays audiences simply won't sit through two intervals".

"I like to write things which are both funny and serious," he explains, reclining in a leather armchair at the book-lined house he shares with the writer Claire Tomalin in Richmond, south London. "Some things in life are serious, some things in life are ridiculous. It's often quite difficult to know when one is writing whether it's going to turn out to be seen as funny or not. I certainly found Copenhagen very difficult to write, but I found Noises Off even more difficult, because of its complexities. I also found Donkeys' Years terribly difficult - I really struggled with the early drafts of that."

Frayn's own student days, prior to a stint in journalism at the Guardian and Observer, were spent at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He studied philosophy, which is the subject of his next book, due out in September. With admirable bathos, however, he admits that "I don't know if it [philosophy] has any practical importance. It's a bit like music or art. If music speaks to you, it's one of the most important things in life. But you can't give any account of its practical use. It doesn't make you a better person. It doesn't improve social problems. It is an end in itself."

And the theatre? "I think it occupies an astonishingly large place in the national culture and consciousness. It ought in theory to be completely superseded by the cinema and television, but in fact, as people who work in the theatre always tell you when they're arguing for subsidy, more people go to plays every week than watch football matches, which is really quite astonishing. And if you look at the review pages of any national newspaper you'll see an enormous amount of space is devoted to reviewing plays, even though they are accessible only to a very small audience."

For Frayn, nothing is out of bounds - not even that which a man of the theatre might be expected to regard as sacred. "Whether the arts should be subsidised at all is a very difficult matter," he says. "Why don't we all pay more to go to the theatre and opera and ballet than we do?"

He leaves the question dangling. One imagines that he is instinctively suspicious of hard and fast answers - Copenhagen implied that sticking to an "uncertainty principle" is a useful map for life. But there is one subject on which he is, surprisingly, not so tentative. He says Tony Blair is the finest prime minister he can remember. As Frayn is now 72, that presumably includes everyone all the way back to Winston Churchill.

"I know the whole Iraq thing is a huge question mark," he says. "When it began I accepted his arguments and I thought we were right to go in. There have been some good aspects to the invasion, but it has brought so much disaster for the Iraqi people that I think I was probably wrong to do so. But Iraq apart, I think Blair has been pretty remarkable.

"He has achieved a measure of income redistribution towards the poorest people. He has diverted a great deal more money towards education and the health service. Blair has provided economic stability of a sort no previous government has managed. And his ability as a human being to survive the pressure is extraordinary."

Blair has seen at least two Frayn plays, Copenhagen and Benefactors. He was due to attend Democracy but pulled out: it was the day of his heart scare. The Prime Minister's admiration is obviously genuine, so why did Frayn turn down a knighthood? "I don't want any dingle-dangles added to my name," he says simply. "Why, if you've made a teeny name for yourself by writing things, would you change it? I think it's all completely ridiculous. But I wouldn't wish to stop anybody else becoming a lord or a marquis or whatever they want to be. It makes the world more colourful."

After a pause, he reflects on Blair's recent travails. "I'm all in favour of selling peerages. Why not? If you can raise a bit of money, if there's a market there, why not sell them?" Already, a twinkle in his eye suggests that a new literary idea is taking shape. Whether comical or serious, it will certainly be complex.

David Smith is a journalist at the Observer. Donkeys' Years runs at the Comedy Theatre, London SW1 (0870 060 6622) until 29 July

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