We rightly prize young dramatists. But there's something to be said for a senior playwright blessed with a long memory, such as Peter Whelan. In this gripping, semi-autobiographical new play he recalls what it was like to be a national serviceman sent to a divided Berlin in 1950 at the height of the cold war.
Not surprisingly, Whelan's hero, Pat, cuts a convincing figure. Aged 19, part of the Education Corps and with stories by Turgenev and Chekhov in his knapsack, he finds himself in a city where the Russians have been transformed from wartime allies into peacetime enemies. In the course of an eventful weekend, he is left to guard an army education centre in Charlottenburg. First a Pandarus-like sergeant from the Kinema Corps tries to get him into bed with the centre's German secretary. But when she fails to turn up for a dance-date, Pat brings back an apparently American soldier, at which point his troubles really begin.
Whelan touches on many themes in this engrossing play. One is the contrast between the idealistic naivete of the national serviceman and the entrenched attitudes of the old sweats who have been through a war. But the play is also about the artificial barriers, sexual and political, we erect between human beings. Propositioned by the young "American", Pat is seriously tempted, only to find himself up on a charge of bringing a Soviet spy into the centre. Whelan's point is that the 1950s' demonisation of both Russians and homosexuals led to failures of understanding. The postwar world, he implies, might have been a better place if both the cold war and our sexual paranoia had been prematurely thawed.
Sometimes you feel Whelan yokes together dissimilar things: there was, after all, good reason to be suspicious of the Russians after the Berlin blockade of 1948, which led even Aneurin Bevan to call for the despatch of allied tanks. And, technically, the device of setting the action inside Pat's memory seems redundant. But this is still a wonderfully written play that conjures up, in a Le Carré-like way, the equivocal mystery of 1950s Berlin and that follows its own principles by refusing to dehumanise the enemy. Even the army intelligence sergeant, who sees reds in as well as under the bed, is a shrewd operator, who argues you have to read War and Peace to understand the thinking Russian.
Robert Delamere's atmospheric production is superbly designed by Simon Higlett, with evocative tramlines running through the centre of the broken-windowed Charlottenburg house. Anthony Flanagan, making his stage debut as Pat, shows a technical command that implies a remarkable future and there is impeccable support from Anna Madeley as the German secretary and Colin Mace as the red-hunting sergeant. Whelan has always been a good writer. Here, by excavating his own past, he has produced an exceptional play that delves deep into our collective national memory.
Until October 10. Box office: 01789 403403.
