Interview: All the world's a stage

When Michael Frayn was a child, the other children nicknamed him “the scientist”. He wasn’t, of course. Just a bright little boy with glasses, who eventually became a successful novelist and playwright. In his writing he worries a lot about who we are, how we understand the world, and how subjectivity lies at the heart of everything – the tricky stuff that science and scientists also grapple with. His latest book, he tells Liz Else, attempts to deal with many of these issues head-on, asking, for example, what the universe would…