A jailbreak. A Russian spy. Surly KGB guards. A shock twist. Simon Gray’s 1995 play has all the ingredients of a thriller, but actual thrills are few and far between. And, alas, this ponderous revival by Edward Hall doesn’t make much of a case for it as an unfairly neglected classic.
‘Cell Mates’ is best known for being the show that its lead, Stephen Fry, walked out of after it original press night. Without Fry, the production fell apart. Hall’s revival takes an approach that’s as reverential as a white-gloved curator, lifting a crumbling manuscript out of storage.
There are the kind of carpeted, stuffy set designs that I can never take seriously after ‘Acorn Antiques’. Long, pointed silences. And my god, the endless set changes, that feel like the boiler packing out midway through a warm shower.
The story is mostly a two-hander between enigmatic spy George Blake (Geoffrey Streatfeild) and Sean Burke, the younger man who springs him out of jail (Emmet Byrne).
But the genuinely cool, real-life story of Blake’s escape from Wormwood Scrubs using a ladder made from knitting needles is glossed over, in favour of the subsequent months of virtual house arrest that followed when Burke joined him in Russia.
It’s a chance for Gray to needle inconclusively at the mass of contradictions this man contained. He was a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist who believed that Soviet Russia was the country of the future. His answer to the Stalinist purges was ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’, and here he delves into complicated breakfast metaphors in an attempt to justify his beliefs.
Streatfeild’s performance captures all of Blake’s oddness, his combination of almost psychopathic logic with touching vulnerability. But Emmet Byrne has less to work with as his Irish accomplice, who stretches believability with his endless naivety, drink problem and penchant for launching into ‘Danny Boy’. What could possibly persuade this feckless lad to risk everything for an aloof, balding older man?
Perhaps a secret romance. But Gray’s play both flirts with the idea and rules it out. It’s typical of the often infuriating caution, the shying away from either glamour or controversy that characterises his approach to his mysterious subject matter.
Still, I guess one of the good things about ‘Cell Mates’ is that it cuts through all that James Bond propaganda to convince you that being a spy is actually really, really dull.