Spies are basically actors. They create fake personas in order to achieve their ends. But the difference is that they do this 24/7. All the time. Especially during a secret operation. So the first thing to say about David Eldridge’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1963 classic, which first opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre last year, is that it offers the strange joy of watching actors playing characters who are themselves acting a role. The second thing to say about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is that this is first of Le Carré’s novels to be put on stage – and in some respects you can see why.
As a 1960s Cold War drama that crosses Europe, with its opening scene and final tragedy happening at the newly erected Berlin Wall, the material is more suited to the mobility of film, especially the melancholy of monochrome, than the stasis of theatre. But anyway, what’s it about? The plot centres on Alec Leamas, a disillusioned British head of Berlin station whose spies keep getting killed. Recalled to London, he appears to give way to despair, but is actually preparing to bring down his nemesis, the ex-Nazi Mundt of the East German secret services. While in England, Leamas is instructed by Control, and also meets Liz Gold, a young and idealistic librarian and Communist Party member, who is perversely attracted to him.
Although the second half of the story is a tense, plot-twisting GDR courtroom drama, with high stakes, the first is more moody and, as the 1965 film version starring Richard Burton exemplifies, much slower in pace. In fact, Eldridge’s take on the story follows the film script, adapted by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, quite closely, but substitutes encounters with Smiley, Le Carré’s most compelling creation, for images of our antihero treading the rain-soaked streets of London. These are Leamas’s memories and serve as a commentary on the ethics of deception, which applies to both politics and love.
Le Carré always excelled in penning a thrilling story, adding additional plot twists to the usual convolutions of spycraft. Although the real world of espionage does surely depend on both second-guessing and deceiving your opponent, the novelist always exaggerated the complications involved – which makes for much more stimulating reading. Like the rococo in art, the elaborations are fascinatingly cerebral and beautifully thought out. Great writing. Eldridge’s version is faithful to this and he adds not only the episodes with Smiley, but also a violent interrogation scene that is almost unbearable to watch. Likewise, the final episode at the Berlin Wall gets, in Jeremy Herrin’s fast-paced production, a neat coup de theatre that is very enjoyable.
But for me the main problem with this play is the first half. What neither Eldridge nor Herrin can quite manage to do is to make the relationship between Leamas and Liz credible enough to get us emotionally invested in the story. The pace is too fast, with not enough melancholy pauses, and surely there could have been some more material added to flesh out this couple’s feelings. As it is, things happen very fast, and atmosphere is sacrificed to speed of storytelling – which dilutes the noir in this noirish thriller. It’s only when Leamas finds himself in the GDR courtroom, faced not only with Mundt, but also with his accuser Fiedler, that the drama intensifies.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and who then had to go back out on a final mission, is a story that troubles our illusions about the moral superiority of our leaders in the titanic struggle between West and East in the Cold War. Le Carré’s simple point, faithfully emphasized by Eldridge, is that conflict cannot afford moral niceties. The name of the great game of espionage is mendacity and manipulation. And today surely very little has changed: this critique is still relevant. Grey areas bleed across the map of nations, here made literal in designer Max Jones bare stage, which features a map of Europe divided in true Cold War fashion. Moral dirt is similarly apparent in the grubbiness of moth-bitten 1960s clothing, especially Laemas’s.
The production also includes the icons of the story: the bicycle with its spinning wheel, the whiskey bottle and the GDR flag. Rory Keenan’s Leamas strikes the right tone of bitterness and bile, allowing only a couple of glimpses of tenderness to appear in his relationship with Agnes O’Casey’s Liz, who is perhaps a little too self-assertive for Le Carré’s mild and naïve librarian. John Ramm’s Smiley is more successfully imagined, with his donnish demeanour and cool control, than Ian Drysdale’s rather unconvincing Control, while Phillip Arditti’s Fiedler and Gunnar Cauthery’s Mundt comes across as suitably sinister and frankly frightening. It’s a good show, but at a little over two hours there is space for a deeper investment in the Leamas–Liz relationship.
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