REVIEW: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Theatre Royal hosts le Carré
“Zere is only one sing I don’t understand,” says menacing East German interrogator/spy Fiedler (Eddie Toll) in a moment of high tension (a description you can apply to most of the play).
Vell done, zat man!
Zere were a few sings I didn’t understand as John le Carré’s breakout tale of 1963 unfolded on stage – and that’s neither criticism of him nor of David Eldridge’s adaptation of the novel.
Frankly, I’ve always tended to get lost in the world of espionage.
Who/what can you believe or trust amid double agents and double bluffs and maybe triple or quadruple bluffs or even quadruple agents? Who’s for you, who against? Never, ever take the bloke at the employment agency at face value – or anyone for that matter.
All credit to the people who do this stuff for real, no doubt keeping us safe, but how they don’t end up quivering blobs of paranoia is beyond me.
Spy Alec Leamas (Ralf Little in beige and cloud of cigarette smoke) isn’t exactly full of the joys of spring as he’s urged by Control to undertake one last mission.
You don’t get to be called Control for nothing and Nicholas Murchie’s clubby bonhomie over the whisky glasses has a particularly English edge of steel.
How does he, Leamas, feel about venturing back behind the Iron Curtain one last time to eliminate the bastard Mundt (Peter Losasso) who just eliminated his last agent?
No thanks, you sense, won’t cut it.
Leamas, suggests Control with the clincher, could be reinvented as “a resentful kind of inebriate bore”. Probably not much of a stretch, that, I’m thinking.
The exchange takes place in the home of George Smiley (excellently brought to some semblance of human life by Tony Turner who also doubles as East German prosecutor Karden).
Smiley’s shadowy presence looms, as it does over much that le Carré wrote. What a sad fictional life the character seems to have had.
As we take our seats at the start of this grimly fascinating tale, a crashed bicycle rests centre stage on a map of eastern Europe, wheel sadly spinning.
Then, after a frenetic moment featuring gunshots and trilbys, we’re treated to a prolonged explainer, characters addressing each other with a clear view to putting us – the audience - in the picture as to the nature of post-war Europe, currently being split by the Berlin Wall.
I welcomed the scene setter. With this grounding, I felt confident of navigating the murky shenanigans to come, the snarky sneers, the punch ups, the atmospheric fags ignited in dark alleys and the fake geniality of covert warfare – “We know your game and we know you know”. This before someone’s head is plunged into a bucket of water.
Ralf Little convincingly embodies Leamas, a man with unsavoury domestic habits and a shadowy back story; a wife lurking somewhere far distant and even some kids.
But he gets a girl. I know girls make weird choices but you have to be suspicious. What’s librarian Liz Gold’s game? She (played by Gráinne Dromgoole) invites him to her home for a meal. “Are you hungry?” she asks. “No,” he replies. And she doesn’t kick him out.
“There’s a sadness in you,” she observes. Uh-oh, she’s hooked. But really?
At the end of Jeremy Herrin’s production (Jeremy worked in Newcastle once, as a director at Live Theatre) the audience didn’t leap to its feet and whoop.
Thank goodness for small mercies.
But in any case it’s not that kind of show. I enjoyed it for the novelty of it’s not being a musical but a drama where you must hang on the words – even if, like Fiedler, you might still end up a little bit in ze dark.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold runs until Saturday, July 11. Tickets from the Theatre Royal box office.