The original production of Simon Gray’s play in 1995 was overshadowed by the disappearance of one of its stars, Stephen Fry, after some dicey reviews. Edward Hall, in the first major revival since then, comes up with a stronger cast, reminds us that the play explores the multiple facets of betrayal but can’t conceal the fact that there is an unresolved enigma at its heart.
Gray starts from a known fact: in 1966 George Blake, condemned to 42 years in jail for espionage, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs with the aid of an anarchic Irish petty criminal, Sean Bourke. But Gray is less interested in the mechanics of flight than in the strange sequel. Blake, a convinced communist, flees to Moscow where he persuades Bourke to join him for a short spell until the heat is off. Having escaped one form of captivity in the Scrubs, Bourke then finds himself a virtual prisoner in Moscow either through KGB diktat or Blake’s careful calculation.
It’s a story that allows Gray to explore, with elegant irony, the labyrinthine nature of deceit. But Gray’s manifest dislike of the manipulative Blake means that he never achieves the empathy Alan Bennett displays in An Englishman Abroad for Guy Burgess and in A Question of Attribution for Anthony Blunt. Where Gray sees political convictions as prisons, Bennett realises that traitors are true to their beliefs. The play is also curiously evasive about the real nature of the relationship between Blake and Bourke: it is more than once compared to a marriage but we are never sure what that means. Blake, it is clear, was forced to abandon his wife and family in London but Bourke’s sexuality remains a mystery. Are we expected to believe he remained celibate during a long spell in Moscow?
Hall’s production, however, achieves the right balance between the two leads. Geoffrey Streatfeild shows with great precision how Blake, who was of mixed Dutch-Egyptian parentage, assumed a mask of English diffidence which concealed a mixture of ideological certainty and inner solitude: he plays the character more sympathetically than Gray writes him. Emmet Byrne gives us all of Bourke’s mischief, unruliness, appetite for alcohol and literary aspirations. Philip Bird and Danny Lee Wynter make a plausible pair of KGB heavies and Cara Horgan is good as Blake and Bourke’s Muscovite housekeeper. But the play does little to solve the riddle as to whether there was something more than friendship to this fugitive odd couple.
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Cell Mates is at Hampstead theatre, London, until 20 January. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
