SINGLE SPIES
Richmond Theatre and touring

Seen 2 March
, 2016
***

Actors hate getting typecast from their TV roles, and rightly so. The joy is in seeing them play wildly against our small-screen expectations. It may be over 15 years since 2point4 children ended, but somewhere in our hearts Belinda Lang is still the wry yet put-upon wife and mother from that sitcom. So to see her cutting loose in the role of Australian-born actress Coral Browne, wrapped in a fur coat and speaking in an arch drawl, is a delight.

This is in An Englishman Abroad, the first part of Alan Bennett’s Single Spies double bill adapted from his 1980s TV plays. The Englishman in question is Guy Burgess, who by now has been living as a defector in Moscow for several years (Lang as Browne on the dreary city and Chekhov’s heroines’ eagerness to return there: “I cannot understand what those Three Sisters were on about”) and needs some new suits from his Jermyn Street tailor. He invites Browne round to his Muscovite pied-à-terre for a measuring-up session, a light lunch (a couple of tomatoes and a clove or two of garlic), some musical entertainment (his one record, by Browne’s “ex-beau” Jack Buchanan) and gossip. Above all, what he misses is gossip.

Alan Bennett has become a national treasure thanks to his skill at sticking the knife into Englishness with scalpel-like precision whilst simultaneously affirming his love of the national character. These two plays are about the notorious Cambridge spies, and how men at the heart of the English establishment could sell their country out to the Soviet Communists precisely because they so cherished it. Each explains his reasons with the ever-so-English line “It seemed the right thing to do, at the time.”

Nicholas Farrell’s blithe but lonely Burgess is followed in the second half, A Question Of Attribution, by Anthony Blunt, the coldly assured art historian who had risen to become a knight of the realm and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. David Robb has had some experience of this kind of figure, fresh as he is from tending medically to the assorted inmates of Downton Abbey. But not even Maggie Smith’s dowager countess could have prepared him for Lang’s appearance as Elizabeth II, all strangulated vowels and rather too insightful questions. At the time of the play, Blunt has confessed to MI5 but the story has not yet broken publicly. Lang’s Queen, however, seems to know his treacherous secret without ever saying so; after their encounter, Blunt confesses, “I was talking about art; I’m not sure what she was talking about.” This working-on-two-levels business is done cleverly without being clever-clever and smug about it, and director Rachel Kavanaugh pitches her actors just right.

Written for The Lady.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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