Brighton Year-Round 2026

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

David Eldridge

Genre: Adaptation, Costume, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Theatre Royal, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

John Le Carré’s novels seem ideal for television, less so for film. A compelling BBC Radio 4 series in 2008 with Simon Russell Beale suggested ruminant psychodramas of the mind. Enter David Eldridge, first dramatist to adapt any Le Carré novel for the stage. It premiered at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre in August 2024. The bleakly nihilistic but dramatic The Spy Who Came In From The Cold proves a compelling narrative, and sometimes absorbing theatre. Recast and sometimes rethought, it’s directed at Theatre Royal Brighton, till June 6 by Jeremy Herrin; with tour direction by Joe Lichtenstein.

Even the Burton film took two hours 40. Taking Le Carré’s compressed 1963 novel, Eldridge’s limber script and Herrin’s fluid direction ensure the drama with internal dialogues takes a brisk two hours 15 with interval. It’s still evenly-paced, but Eldridge and Herrin have pulled out every stop against deadliness.

Le Carré under his real name David Cornwall had himself just been ‘outed’ as an agent by moles from the Cambridge ring and forced to retire: betrayal seeps from every pore here. Leamas (Ralf Little) 45 (50 in the novel) head of the Berlin ‘station’ has just lost his last operative Karl Remick, shot by ruthless Waffen SS turned communist East German Secret Service spymaster Mundt. Unusually, none are interrogated. What’s going on?

Little is the antithesis of brooding Welsh Richard Burton or his more authentically rumpled predecessor in the part, Rory Keenan. It blows away old-school-tie accretions that Leamas specifically despises and doesn’t belong to. Little’s more youthful elan is nearer the original, conveying the muscle-memory of SOE days. His vocal clarity too is striking (occasionally just a touch vehement): his Leamas is engagingly cut-through, his voice divining the truth like a blowtorch on an encrusted old web.

Eldridge shifts chronology to ambush with flashbacks. Characters – particularly Smiley – visit protagonist Alec Leamas: time eddies even in spine-tingling moments. Max Jones’ newly-adapted set is seductively simple, the characters swept up in Lucy Cullingford’s deft and never crowded movement (with slightly snaky queues on a smaller stage); or Sam Lyon-Behan’s new fight-scenes.

A circular floor-map of Europe with Berlin centred, initially with a dropped bicycle, the set’s occasionally populated with chairs. The original upstage surprise is now in plain sight, though looms like a grid of library shelves. Stagecraft triumphs over a switchback of deceit and sleight of ear (in what language is the trial scene actually conducted as characters sound echt-German-ish and English at the same time?). It’s Le Carré’s world struck by lightning and blackout – and Azusa Ono’s lighting scores in the gloaming. Though the new blue surround-prosc-arch-light (not possible in the Minerva, nor needed) is a minimal Miriam Beuther-type gesture rather lost here. Searchlights are more polite nudges.

Particularly compelling is Paul Englishby’s music: magnificently weary film jazz circa 1960: its five-note motif is less cool than tenebrous, all devils fading, swirled in Elizabeth Purnell’s sound.

We start with familiar spectacle-wiping George Smiley (softly ruminant Tony Turner), often in Leamas’ head, determinedly on gardening leave. Smiley narrates at key points, often stands in a gallery overhead, coyly omniscient. “And who am I?” Literally above all this dirty business. That falls to Control – an almost caricatured drollery from Nicholas Murchie; eyebrows upped to warmth or dropped to iciness.

Control reels in a weary, nearly burned-out Leamas for one last job before “coming in”. To revenge himself on Mundt for killing all his agents. Accentuate disillusion, go to seed, be apparently turned by the KGB then plant doubts (by denying them to Mundt’s number two, Fiedler) that Mundt is an MI6 operative: let his own side take him out.

What is it about even young male novelists (as Le Carré was) thinking young women fall instantly for middle-aged men? Little’s vibrancy at least partly redeems this. Dropping rather neatly into a librarian cover job Leamas encounters much younger Liz Gold (a tremulous, truthful Gráinne Dromgoole) who falls in love with him. There’s more anguish than chemistry; the love-scene is even more truncated than I remember, but Dromgoole flings down Liz’s fearless desire like a manifesto of modern love.  Leamas is not yet in any position to reciprocate bar sex, though feels loyalty enough – and prescience – to warn Control to keep away.

Murchie and Turner memorably shadow each other, paradoxically like Russian dolls. With each inflection and intervention, you never know who’s inside whom.  Dromgoole is affecting and anguished in the trial scene where several scales fall at once: she semaphores Liz Gold’s terrible awakening, and courage to accept it.

Peter Losasso’s Mundt brings elan to his cold killer. There’s a touch of the whistling murderer about him: he’s consistently engaging in his stock leather jacket (there is to be sure, much dressing of stock characters).

Fiedler (Eddie Toll) is Mundt’s opposite in a powerful performance where every word and gesture rings like an anvil. Fiedler’s a genuinely thoughtful if absolute idealist. He’s also Jewish – the anti-Semitic theme is played up with Mundt’s fascist delight in hissing “Jew” as he’s given brief leave to beat him up. It also kins Fiedler with Liz, the “pretty little Jew” as Control calls her to Leamas’ face. As Leamas reveals to Liz there’s depths of anti-Semitism on both sides.

Though shot in the first moments Leamas’ top agent Karl Riemeck (Jonny Burman, also Kiever, Leamas’ first handler in the East) pops up as a revenant wheeling his bike across the stage, mordantly wishing his old chief “good luck”. He’s just as much in Leamas’ head as Smiley. Ashe (Jeff D’Sangalang) semaphores a vivid if underused flaneur, a kind of cut-down Guy Burgess. Melody Chikakane Brown as the thoroughly unpleasant Miss Crail and adamantine but searching President on the Tribunal is similarly underemployed. Jo Servi as Circus functionary Pitt, luckless grocer Ford and Prison Governor reinforces an inscrutable Circus look. By this time you almost prefer the passions of the other side.

This is an imaginative staging of Le Carré’s often flattened characters, if losing a little of the original production’s panache; made up for by Little, whos’ compelling throughout. Rather even pacing in the first act is compensated for in a gripping second. Not a character-driven narrative, Eldridge, Herrin and his team make the best case for it. Little’s Leamas emerges with volatile, even passionate life, hard-bitten yet anguished. Turner’s Smiley is not the Smiley we know, yet Turner imports a little of what we know back. Toll’s Fiedler is an animated exception, and Dromgoole lends the intelligent, ardent Gold a humanity her author-etched fragility cries out for. There’s some fine ensemble work – not present in the first production – from James Burman and Clara Wessely.

If you like Le Carré, see it and be a touch surprised. If you think you don’t, this desperate elegy of betrayal, straight from Le Carré’s own hurt, will haunt you with the truth of its despair.

Casting Director Matilda James CDG, Assistant Director Tiffany Wong, Associate Designer Ruth Hall, Voice and Dialect Coach Salvatore Sorce, Intimacy Director Clare Foster.

Production Manager Tom Hickson, Costume Supervisor Laura Rushton, Designer, Wigs, Hair  Make-Up Rob Wilson, Props Supervisor Lily Mollgaard, Associate Costume Supervisor Melanie Jane Brookes, Associate Props Supervisors Kirsty Durman, Ysabella Page, Casting assistant Emily Chase.

Company Stage Managers Cosmo Cooper, Andrew Speed, Deputy Stage Managers Richard Lodge, Lotttie McClarin, Assistant Stage Manager Jasmine Hurley.

Published June 3, 2026June 3, 2026 by Simon Jenner