SINGLE SPIES. Tour to 11 May.

Tour

SINGLE SPIES
by Alan Bennett

Theatre Royal Bath tour to 11 May 2002
Runs 2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS 01865 305305 (Oxford performances)
Review Timothy Ramsden 4 February at Oxford Playhouse

Bennett's betrayed by his own adaptation from TV, faring better after the interval.This is a double-bill of very different halves. An Englishman Abroad, is a stage version of Bennett's TV play about actress Coral Browne's Moscow meeting with promiscuous traitor Guy Burgess. It's much inferior to the TV original and in David Grindley's lukewarm production Liza Goddard does little to suggest Browne's temperament.

Robert Powell does a neat job as Burgess, the Cambridge playboy confined to his shabby soviet flat till 4pm each day, using wit and poise to cover the sorry pointlessness of his life.

More substantial in every way is A Question of Attribution about the much later exposed spy Anthony Blunt. He never fled to the USSR and became Keeper of the Queen's pictures. Central to this piece, written for the stage, is a superb encounter between Her Majesty and the art expert who gave away her state's secrets. Here Goddard is spot-on in tone and posture. It's Bennett and Powell who between them give unwonted dollops of wit and charm to the snobbishly offputting Blunt.

Bennett makes clear it's gossipy, unintellectual English life, with its stress on good form that creates spies and allows them to operate undetected. In Englishman Timothy Kightley's Jermyn Street tailor has no comment on Burgess other than that the measurements Browne brings home for his new suit show he's filled out a bit. It's the London-based Hungarian company that refuse to supply the soviet's supporter.

Kightley is brilliantly understated again in Attribution as a secret service man evincing an interest in Blunt's field of art history. He keeps on a knife-edge whether this is middle-class amateur learning or a ploy to unnerve Blunt with parallels between artistic and political faking. Blunt refuses to accept the polarity of genuine v fake in the art world; in doing so he's evidently justifying his political actions. Though, as Kightley's Chubb says, in art there aren't the consequences.

Both Julian Mitchell's Another Country and Thomas Kilroy's Double Cross offer more penetrating looks at treachery. On balance, though, despite a Blunt who's watered-down rather than flaming in oils, the second play makes this tour worth considering.

Burgess/Blunt: Robert Powell
Coral Browne/Her Majesty the Queen: Liza Goddard
Tailor/ Chubb: Timothy Kightley
Tolya/Phillips: Russell Bright
Shopkeeper/Colin/Restorer: Nigel Barrett

Director: David Grindley
Designer: Tim Shortall
Lighting: Jason Taylor
Music/Sound: Simon Slater

2002-02-05 01:30:18