Review Agent Of Influence

Francis Beckett infiltrates the murky world of pre-Second World War espionage through a fictional fashion correspondent in an enjoyable new play.

Agent of Influence
by Sarah Sigal

The Spy Who Came In From The Catwalk
http://www.thedraytonarmstheatre.co.uk/

In 1936, at the time of the abdication crisis, Lady Pamela More is the elegant fashion correspondent for The Times newspaper. She is uninterested in politics:  “I leave politics to the politicians.”

Indeed, at most, she views Germany’s new leader through the eyes of a London sophisticate who thinks all that shouting and goose-stepping is in rather poor taste: “I know Mr Hitler has done a lot for Germany, but it does look over the top.”

And she never asks about the First World War, then known simply as The Great War: “Far too gloomy.”

Yet by 1939 she is an experienced and courageous spy for (I assume) MI5, providing crucial information on the near-treasonable activities of the former king Edward VIII and his wife, the former Wallis Simpson, now the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

She is also able to face her own past, including a botched abortion leaving her unable to have children, which neither her mother nor her husband know about.

The story of the fictional Lady Pamela is told with sensitivity and masterly understatement by writer Sarah Sigal and performed to cut glass perfection by Rebecca Dunn.

Dunn's Lady Pamela is brittle at the start, but conveys the vulnerability beneath the veneer. When she speaks as someone else – Wallis Simpson, say – she does an excellent impression. However, it's not so polished that we ever doubt it's Lady Pamela doing it herself.

There's a minimalist set by Lucky Bert and Jessica Beck directs Dunn with not too many costume changes, as befits the director of a one-woman play in a charming but tiny fringe theatre.

All three have sufficient sense of history and respect for the nineteen thirties to convey the period authentically and avoid judging the action and characters by the standards of a later period.

The piece does rely on a few slightly dodgy historical assertions – not that I mind: that’s the nature of drama.

But we don’t know that the Duchess of Windsor had an affair with Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop. If she did, MI5 did not know about it. The only inconclusive evidence for it was unearthed after the Second World War and immediately suppressed by Prime Minister Clement's Attlee's  government.

We don’t know that the Windsors passed secrets to Hitler's Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, only that they had contact with him before the war; and it’s quite unlikely they would have had any secrets worth passing on.

It’s also pretty unlikely that the fashion correspondent of the Times in 1936 would have disliked and despised Diana Mitford, previously the wife of brewing heir Bryan Guinness but by then married to Britain’s fascist leader Oswald Mosley.

If  she did, she would have kept it to herself: the Mitfords were popular and fashionable in the circles Lady Pamela would have moved in.

And Lady Pamela is recruited by the handsome spymaster Charles, with whom she has an affair. In fact, she could only have been recruited by M – Maxwell Knight of MI5 - who not only considered it wrong to have an affair with his agents, but was also impotent.

However Lady Pamela's story and exploits are a nicely honed fiction. At about 75 minutes without an interval, this is an interesting, entertaining piece wittily written with a splendid central performance and well worth a green light.

Review Orbits

The clash between a famous actor and a notorious playwright in a new drama is relevant to today's politics, even if reviewer Francis Beckett disagrees with some of the play's conclusions.  

Orbits
by Wally Sewell

From Two Different Planets
http://www.thedraytonarmstheatre.co.uk/

Wally Sewell’s Orbits is an interesting new play for the post truth era.

Across the top of the set is a sign which says, in thick capitals: THE TRUTH IS CONCRETE.  “But the truth isn’t concrete” says actor Charles Laughton in the play.  “It’s clay. It’s putty.” No, says playwright Bertolt Brecht, it’s concrete.

In an age when politicians’ half-truths have become outright, brazen lies, it’s a point worth making. A thing happened, or it didn’t happen. Barack Obama was either born in the United States of America, as he said; or he wasn’t, as Donald Trump claimed.  He was. That’s the truth.

The play imagines the private talks between the two men while Laughton was rehearsing Brecht’s Galileo in New York in 1947.

The louche, comfortable, gay, English actor begins by hero-worshipping the spare, ascetic German Marxist playwright, and ends up despising him; Brecht starts out despising the portly and rather right wing product of an English public school, and ends up pathetically needing his approval.

Mingled skilfully with this relationship is the relationship between Galileo and his inquisitor.

The play opens with Laughton and Brecht doing some improvisation, to help Laughton get the feel of Galileo and identify Galileo with his own life.  (Pedant’s note: Laughton’s school was the Jesuit-run Stonyhurst, where his schoolmasters would not have made him bend over to be beaten; he would have had to hold out his hand instead. I am rather sorry I know that.)

They are imagining the moment of Galileo’s apostasy, when he abjectly confesses for fear of being tortured. And the play ends with Brecht himself, denying his socialism before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

It’s a clever idea, well executed, and with a serious message for the Trump era, when truth is under siege.

Like any two hander, the play only works if both characters work. Wally Sewell understands the languid, worldly Laughton rather well, and actor Edmund Dehn puts in a commanding performance, helped with a voice that sounds as though he gargles with claret.

The weakness is Brecht, and I do not know if the fault is with Sewell, director Anthony Shrubsall, or actor Peter Saracen. But the sneering, didactic, neurotic, self-righteous hypocrite I saw portrayed last night is not the man who wrote Life of Galileo and Mother Courage and her Children, and who founded the Berlin Ensemble.

The charge of hypocrisy, which this play levels at Brecht, does not stand up, in my opinion.  Though Brecht was critical of Galileo’s climb-down, his decision to say what HUAC wanted to hear – that he was not a socialist – was consistent with his view of Galileo’s behaviour.

Galileo disowned what he knew to be true rather than be tortured.  Why not? He’d have said it under torture anyway – most of us, I suspect, would say anything at all under torture, just to get them to stop. I know I would.

And Brecht told HUAC he was not a socialist, when he was.  Why not? If he’d said anything else they might have stopped him getting his plane home the next day, where he could get on with his life and speak the truth.

It’s a weakness for me. However that does not impede an interesting, thoughtful well-acted evening at the theatre which deserves an amber/green light.