REVIEW: Cell Mates, Hampstead Theatre ✭✭✭

Cell Mates. Hampstead Theatre.

12 December 2017

3 Stars

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Cell Mates has become a curio over time mainly to the troubles surrounding its West End production in 1995. Star Stephen Fry walked out of the production suffering from a breakdown, and the tabloid frenzy that surrounded it overshadowed the play itself. Thankfully Fry made a comeback in more ways than one, and Edward Hall’s new production aims to reclaim the play itself, and there is much to admire in Simon Gray’s writing, even if the play now looks dated.

Based on fact, it’s the story of spy, double agent, and some would say traitor George Blake, who, four years into a 42 year prison sentence for leaking some of the West’s most sensitive intelligence secretes to the Russians, hatched a plot to escape from Wormwood Scrubs. He enlisted Irishman Sean Bourke to break him out, and, following the successful escape, Blake was delivered to Moscow in October 1966. Bourke arrived in Moscow with the intention of lying low for a few months until the dust settled, but he was detained for 22 months by the KGB for differing reasons. It transpired it was Blake who was keeping him there for his own reasons. Effectively the men swap the Scrubs for another kind of prison, the Communist system that Blake calls home, but which traps Bourke.

It’s fascinating material, and this well acted production brings the most out of the script. Geoffrey Streatfield is excellent as Blake, charting the journey from ‘humble’ prisoner to defender of the Communist faith very well, manipulative, snobbish and aggressive; through his relationship with Bourke he makes clear that the class system also imprisons them. As Bourke, Emmet Byrne gives a fine performance, particularly in the second half when he realises how trapped he has been, playing the emotional context very well, although occasionally his accent was a little inaudible with his diction rushed. The   play is essentially a two hander, with some characters poorly sketched, but Danny Lee Wynter is highly effective as a dour and threatening KGB officer, Philip Bird equally impressive, and Cara Morgan does great work with Zinaida, the servant.

Yet the play is now a period piece, the world of espionage itself being a much different creature today. The generation of writers fascinated by the spies of the Cold War have now passed, or will do, and Alan Bennett in Single Spies wrote about the highly educated defectors with far more lasting style. (Blake is a highly unlikeable character, much more than Bennett’s portrayal of Burgess, for example.) Yet this sure footed production does reclaim Gary’s work from the ‘scandal’ that surrounded its first production, and is well worth seeing for the lead performances alone.

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