It is not every day that you find a Chichester audience being invited to sing the Internationale. But it is a measure of Corin Redgrave's persuasiveness as an actor that, in his one-man play about Anthony Blunt, he gets us to hum along to "Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers" as if at a Marxist pantomime. It is neatly ironic, but it also exposes the paradox at the heart of this solo show.
The essence of Anthony Blunt - famous art historian, one-time KGB spy and Surveyor of the Queen's pictures - is that he was a masked man, a fact brilliantly exploited in Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution and John Banville's novel The Untouchable. Indeed, Banville's hero privately admits that the secret of his success was that he was a great actor capable of playing an infinite number of roles. But when you have Blunt played by a consummate actor in a confessional monologue that covers the six days in November 1979 during which he was outed as a traitor, you inevitably jeopardise the hero's chameleon-like quality. The show's form, in short, is at odds with Blunt's strangely shifting character.
The most original feature of Redgrave's hour-long play is its sympathy for Blunt. In Redgrave's eyes, Blunt's only sin was one of political naivety. His adherence to communism was allegedly inspired by the anti-fascist spirit of the 1930s and, like so many others, he was duped by Stalin, who sold Soviet oil to Franco and was prepared to sign a treaty with Hitler. But Redgrave's Blunt is also a figure who does the state some service by flying to Germany at the end of the war to destroy vital evidence of the Duke of Windsor's complicity with the Nazis. In other words, the British establishment contained far worse traitors than Blunt.
As a corrective to the original vilification of Blunt, the play has some value. But its chief interest is psychological, in that it seems to form part of Corin Redgrave's continuing attempt to come to terms with his own father. Having recently played Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version, a role forever associated with his father, Redgrave now appears at the theatre where Sir Michael was an unforgettable Uncle Vanya 40 years ago.
Like Blunt, whom he knew at Cambridge, Michael Redgrave was a cultivated intellectual who led a double life and combined charm with a mysterious aloofness. In trying to crack the Blunt code, Corin Redgrave is engaged on a personal filial quest and seeking to understand a peculiarly English emotional opacity. It is that, rather than any political apologia for Blunt, that in the end left me strangely moved.
· Until August 10. Box office: 01243 781312.
