Guest Blog: EDINBURGH 2024: Helen Brown on THE TRAITOR'S WIFE

Helen Brown guest blogs for BroadwayWorld about bringing The Traitor’s Wife to the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

History is full of women who have been marginalised from their own biographies, but there are few for whom this is more true than Melinda Marling. 

Paris in the 1930s was full of rich Americans in search of la vie bohème. Despite their enthusiastic adoption of black turtlenecks, gitanes and berets, they were instantly identifiable in every Right Bank cocktail party and Left Bank dive bar. Among them was Melinda, a pretty Park Avenue princess and heiress to a Chicago manufacturing fortune. 

As the Nazis closed in, Melinda played tennis, drank champagne and flirted with a dashing British diplomat. Their whirlwind romance led to a hurried wedding in 1940 as the British embassy scrambled to evacuate. Melinda’s new husband was Donald Maclean – and he was the deadliest agent of Soviet Russia. Over the following decade, Maclean passed thousands of highly classified documents to Moscow, including the secrets of the Enigma code and the Manhattan Project. He was part of the Cambridge spy ring, a group of public school intellectuals who were radicalised at university and recruited to work for the KGB. Much has been written about them – how, and why, did these pillars of the establishment turn against the system that produced them? 

However, almost nothing has been written about Melinda. Documents released in 2015 revealed that she was not only complicit in her husband’s treachery, but helped to facilitate it – she photographed the documents he stole and introduced him to powerful American politicians and businessmen who allowed him access to confidential information. Even when Maclean himself came under suspicion, nobody thought to question his wife. Polite, well-dressed, the perfect hostess: who could possibly believe that she was capable of such betrayal? 

Melinda died in New York in 2010. She never spoke to the media and took her secrets to her grave. Who was she? How did she become the lynchpin of the most catastrophic information leak of the twentieth century, and even more importantly, why? Was she coerced by a fanatical husband or blinded by political ideology? 

The more I tried to research her life, the more frustrated I became by the almost total academic silence surrounding her. In the thousands of pages devoted to Maclean, Burgess, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross, she barely merits a passing mention. As with so many female figures from history, she is pushed firmly to the margins. She exists in the negative space created by her husband’s infamy: not Melinda, but “The Traitor’s Wife.” 

I decided to reclaim her narrative, following her from the moment she met Donald in 1939 to her defection in 1952. My version of her story is unapologetically fictional – so little is recorded of her feelings and actions that I have made them up. The words of the men surrounding her, however, are largely drawn from the historical record. 

I count myself incredibly fortunate to have collaborated with an exceptionally talented composer in John Moore. John has been writing for the stage for over thirty years: The Traitor’s Wife is his eleventh original musical and includes some of his most brilliant – and unforgettable – music. Drawing on Russian folk songs, 1940s jazz and the classical canon, he has created a musical vernacular for the story that is wholly original, but somehow recognisable. 

We are also lucky to be writing for a phenomenally talented young cast, including students from the Royal Northern College of Music, ArtsEd and Mountview. The joy, spontaneity and creativity that they bring to every rehearsal is a resounding rebuttal of the argument that arts in education are a luxury. 

So: a fascinating and previously untold story, a score that will live rent-free in your head for the next six months, and a brilliant cast and creative team. What’s not to love? The Traitor’s Wife will be at Venue 152, Paradise in Augustines, from the 19th-24th August. See you there! 

The Traitor’s Wife runs from 19 to 24 August at Paradise in Augustines - The Sanctuary at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

 

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