Single Spies, Rose Theatre, Kingston

5/5

If, as John Le Carre claims, the secret world is the true expression of a nation’s character, then spy mania and especially our preoccupation with the Russian spy yarn and the Cambridge Five is a fitting British obsession.

The treachery of privileged toffs Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt — the latter gleefully outed as a spy by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 — continues to haunt public consciousness, not least because the conditions of the scandal’s context remain.

Our leaders still conduct imperialist foreign policies and we still live in a climate of security paranoia.

With Eton schoolboys at the helm and the class system intact, there’s never been a better moment to revisit Alan Bennett’s 1987 double-bill Single Spies.

An Englishman Abroad is a comic account of actress Coral Browne’s visit to defector Burgess in his Moscow flat in 1958.

The highly comic treatment means Burgess emerges as a marginal but likeable and rather pathetic figure who clings to his principles.

A Question of Attribution is a more serious scrutiny of treachery through the lens of fine art attribution. Blunt, Poussin expert and keeper of the Queen’s pictures, tries to identify figures that appear below layers of paint after cleaning and X-raying — an elongated metaphor for the hunt for the Cambridge Five.

Like Le Carre, Bennett sees spying as a metaphor not only for how power works but for aspects of life more broadly.

The secret, with its surface/depth divide, is inherently theatrical and dramatic and it’s a masterly play on whether things, or surfaces, can ever be as they seem.

Director Sarah Esdaile provides an honest and unfussy rendition of both pieces, which showcase Bennett’s brilliant language to its best advantage.

Its uncluttered, simple sets and lighting also provide space for the actors to shine and there are some glowing performances.

One of the great Shakespearean actors Michael Pennington plays Blunt and, uniquely, comes up with a human, vulnerable and even fragile version of Blunt.

Normally, he’s played as a distastefully effete, arrogant and urbane robot.

But Pennington’s Blunt has a life of his own and if the actor swaps his usual power and charisma for subtlety and underplaying, the result is an intriguingly sympathetic character, powerless to defend himself against the ironic attacks of the Queen (Helen Schlesinger).

She gives a vibrant performance and also doubles up as the irrepressible Coral Browne and the excellent Alexander Hanson is an elegant, rather contained Guy Burgess.

There’s a fine supporting cast too, a combination making for a great night at the theatre.

Runs until October 11, box office: rosetheatrekingston.org