FringeReview UK 2024

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

Chichester Festival Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre, Tragedy

Venue: Chichester Minerva Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

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. The bleakly nihilistic but dramatic The Spy Who Came In From The Cold proves ideal, directed at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre by Jeremy Herrin till September 21^st.

Even the Burton film took two hours 40. Taking Le Carré’s compressed 1963 novel, Eldridge’s limber script and Herrin’s brisk direction ensure the drama with internal dialogues takes a brisk two hours 15 with interval. Previews took less so that might tighten.

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 (Rory Keenan) 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?

Keenan is the antithesis of brooding Welsh Richard Burton: rumpled, certainly, hair dashingly greyed, but delivering with a light-lilted Irish tenor nearer to James Joyce. It blows away any old school tie accretions that British Leamas specifically despises and doesn’t belong to. For some Keenan’s voice is too low though I had no trouble with it. Keenan is an antidote to the burling drunk heavyweight image, nearer the original, conveying the muscle-memory of SOE days.

Eldridge shifts chronology to ambush with flashbacks. Characters – particularly Smiley – visit protagonist Alec Leamas: time eddies even in spine-tingling moments. Max Jones’ set is seductively simple, the characters swept up in Lucy Cullingford’s deft and never crowded movement, or Brett Yount’s frequent fight scenes. A circular floor-map of Europe with Berlin centred, initially with a dropped bicycle, the set’s populated with chairs, an upstage seating arrangement where you expect offstage actors to sit (they don’t), which burgeons in a trial with podiums. A surprise lurks there. 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.

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

We start with familiar spectacle-wiping George Smiley (softly deliberate John Ramm), 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 – a droll Ian Drysdale, 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? Dropping rather neatly into a librarian cover job Leamas encounters much younger Liz Gold (a tremulous, truthful and heartrending Agnes O’Casey) who falls in love with him. Leamas is not yet in any position to reciprocate bar sex, though feels loyalty enough – and prescience – to warn Control to keep away.

Drysdale and Ramm memorably shadow each other, paradoxically like Russian dolls. With each inflection and intervention, you never know who’s inside whom.  O’Casey 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.

Mundt (Gunnar Cauthery) brings gaiety and 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 (Philip Arditti) 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 (Mat Betteridge, 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 (Tom Kanji) semaphores a vivid if underused flaneur, a kind of cut-down Guy Burgess. Norma Atallah as the thoroughly unpleasant Miss Crail and adamantine but searching President on the Tribunal is similarly underemployed. David Rubin 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 a first-rate staging of Le Carré’s often flattened characters. Not a character-driven narrative, Eldridge, Herrin and his team make the best case for it. Keenan’s Leamas emerges as much as a type can, given equivocal, even mercurial life. Ramm’s Smiley is not yet the Smiley we know, yet Ramm imports a little of what we know back. Arditti’s Fiedler is an animated exception, and O’Casey lends the intelligent, ardent Gold a humanity her author-etched fragility cries out for.

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.

Published August 30, 2024 by Simon Jenner