BWW Reviews: SINGLE SPIES, Rose Theatre, September 30 2014

The late Fifties were pretty grim all over the world - it would be three years into the next decade before Please Please Me reached Number One. Despite Stalinism's demise, things were as grim in Moscow as anywhere, particularly for Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, holed up in a poky flat with a boy ("Allocated?" he ponders) and booze, but no gossip, no glamour and, thanks to an Establishment still smarting that one of their own should defect, no hope of return.

After a visit to see a rare touring drama production (less rarely spent too pissed to notice much), Burgess leaves a note for Australian actress Coral Browne to visit him, demanding that she come armed with a tape measure. Intrigued, she does - and the conversation flows while she takes the measure of the man (literally as well as metaphorically).

Alexander Hanson sparkles as Burgess, all upper class wit, allied to the selfish confidence that Eton and Cambridge brings to its brightest - think Boris Johnson with the politics reversed and the booze multiplied. For all that dashing charisma, Hanson is at his best when longing for, if not "England", then what comprised his England: its clubs, its theatre, its language. Helen Schlesinger's Coral Browne holds her own, determined to avoid falling for the old soak's practised ways of getting his own way - but she doesn't quite succeed. Both are terribly funny and, as you would expect of Bennett, the two outsiders (The Englishman and The Australian Abroad) shed much light on England then - and now.

The second half of the evening sees our attention turn to the Fourth Man of the infamous ring, Anthony Blunt who, unlike Burgess, Philby and Maclean, brokered a deal to stay in England - indeed to stay as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures - in return for half-heartedly identifying other possible spies from grainy 1930s photographs.

Michael Pennington's Blunt is world-weary and somewhat pinched about the face, disdainful of the company of the Royals and their hangers-on, tipsy rather than hammered by the booze. He bats back the questions posed by Cockney copper Chubb (Alex Blake) and only really comes alive when The Queen (Helen Schlesinger in tremendous form again) engages him in unexpected conversation. We see that though HMQ is talking about how fake Renaissance paintings fascinate her and everyone else, Blunt is thinking about his own faking of his younger days, but now stretching into old age.

There's a reason why Sir Trevor Nunn (two seats away from me) and many other leading lights of British Theatre came out to Kingston on a Tuesday evening to see two plays written two years before The Iron Curtain fell - Alan Bennett. Whenever one gets a chance to see anything by him, one should. As The Queen herself might say, one really should.

Single Spies continues at the Rose Theatre, Kingston until 11 October.

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