On my previous trip to Chichester this summer, Southern Railway proved to be a letdown yet again (though I still made it to a performance of the musical Oliver!) so it was a case of leaving the station, walking through the whole of the city centre (the Festival and Minerva theatres are up to twenty minutes away on foot, depending on how many dawdlers one must dodge), and straight into the theatre to collect a programme, use the facilities and find my seat. This time, I had an opportunity to take my time and take a look around. The upstairs bar and grill at the Minerva is now simply called ‘Minerva Bar’, although the Brasserie is still downstairs.
There’s a move towards selling pizzas, and in the half-hour that I sat people watching outside whilst having a latte, bag of crisps and a lemon drizzle from the Festival Theatre Café, I saw one person clutching a pizza. The rest, I assume, had theirs indoors. There were three options – ‘Classic Margherita’ for £12, and ‘Aged Pepperoni’ and ‘The Tuscan’ (whatever that means), both for £13.75. I didn’t fancy pizza after the matinee performance of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold that I went to see, so I plumped for steak and chips at the Greene King pub up the road called The Old Cross.
The show, like the novel it is adapted from, was short – curtain up at 2.15pm and down at 4.25pm, inclusive of a twenty-minute interval. I suppose, having spent my Tube and train commutes between home, work and the theatre in the days leading up to this theatre trip reading the novel, I ought to have known it wasn’t going to be quite as cold and clinical as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, as there was some humanity in every character (and a lot of it in some). While there is some dramatisation, it tended to be of relatively mundane things like a temporary job the central character Alec Leamas took in a strange psychic library, rather than the espionage expeditions people like Leamas went on, very many of which were described.
An agent and his trusty bicycle kept making appearances – Act One Scene One involved the agent not being able to ride fast enough to escape the bullets from the East Germans. In context, the West Germans couldn’t really provide the kind of proactive protection that might have saved him, because they could only return fire if they were fired at in the first place. Without having read the book beforehand, frankly, I think I might have been a bit lost on occasion. I’m not sure either about having some German characters speaking with German ‘accents’ (inverted commas mine) and others sticking with the King’s English – the production really ought to have committed one way or the other.
It was very well performed, and there is something impressive yet chilling in George Smiley’s statement about intelligence agents doing what they do completely without fear or favour, simply carrying out their orders: “spies do disagreeable things, sometimes wicked things, so that people can sleep safely in their beds”. Still, the lady next to me nodded off at some point in the first half (an ice cream in the interval seemed to perk her up for the second) – and I don’t think it was because she was elderly. It was because there was an awful lot of ‘talking heads’ going on to the point that this might as well, at times, have been a radio play (or more likely these days, a podcast). “A little less conversation, a little more action please,” as Elvis sang, would have made this good production a great one.
CAST
Fielder – Philip Arditti
Miss Crail/President of the Tribunal – Norma Atallah
Karl Riemeck / Kiever – Mat Betteridge
Mundt – Gunnar Cauthery
Control – Ian Drysdale
Ashe – Tom Kanji
Alec Leamas – Rory Keenan
Liz Gold – Agnes O’Casey
George Smiley / Karden – John Ramm
Pitt / Ford / Governor – David Rubin
CREATIVES
Director – Jeremy Herrin
Designer – Max Jones
Lighting Designer – Azusa Ono
Composer – Paul Englishby
Sound Designer – Elizabeth Purnell
Movement Director – Lucy Cullingford
Fight Director – Bret Yount
Casting Director – Jessica Ronane CDG
John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
Adapted for the stage by David Eldridge
Minerva Theatre, Chichester, 23 August to 21 September 2024
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