James Phillips calls it the “perfect time” to revive his 2005 drama inspired by the real story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple charged with leaking atomic secrets to the Soviet Union in McCarthy-era America. He is right: in our time of heightened paranoia over Russian spying and contested notions of truth, his script touches a nerve.
Phillips fictionalises the Jewish American couple as Jakob and Esther Rubenstein, whose political idealism spurs the alleged espionage for which they are executed in 1953. The play opens more than two decades later. Matthew, their son, is a lawyer whose romance with a history teacher, Anna, leads him to reappraise whether his parents were betrayed and wrongly convicted. Under Joe Harmston’s direction, scenes from the 1970s are performed in parallel with the Rubensteins’ backstory on a traverse stage, bare but for a table and chairs.
As a study of the motivations that lead ordinary people to leak state secrets, it brings to mind Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and begs the question: are these figures idealists who dare to make a stand or is it “treachery” guided by something more self-serving? But the play does not complicate this question enough or tease out its implications. Henry Proffit, as Jakob, and Ruby Bentall, as Esther, retain our compassion, but they emerge as blinded by their self-defined heroism: “We [working people] can be big inside.”
Lumbering declarations are shoed into the dialogue (“law is a tool for good and for bad”). Actors speak their lines with a stentorian quality – and less than convincing New York accents – while Matthew Bugg’s sound design has the jagged melodrama of a horror movie.
The few stirring scenes reach beyond politics. Matthew, in one memory of childhood, says: “The day they burned my parents alive, I was playing baseball with the social worker.” One wishes for many more of these moments.
At Southwark Playhouse, London, until 13 April.
