Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When playwright David Eldridge was about 11 years old, he witnessed a “brush-past” — a clandestine exchange of information — in an east London underpass.“I was out on my bike and I saw a man and a woman pass a bag between them,” he recalls. “And I’ve always wondered what the story was there. It might have been something to do with criminality, it could have been drugs, anything like that. But when you’re not allowed to know something, it’s human nature to wonder what it is.”Whatever happened that day, for Eldridge it sparked a life-long fascination with spy fiction. That passion now emerges into the daylight at Chichester Festival Theatre in the shape of the first-ever stage production of John le Carré’s espionage thriller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.For many, le Carré’s novel is one of the greatest spy stories ever written. Set in the early 1960s, with the cold war at its height, it is a gnarly, gripping tale of murky morality and expediency, in which disillusioned British agent Alec Leamas is sent out into the field one last time to reel in the chilling, antisemitic East German intelligence officer Mundt.Sixty years after the novel was first published, the world has changed: the Berlin Wall has come down and Checkpoint Charlie is now a museum rather than a nerve-shredding crossing point between East and West Berlin. Yet, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia wages war in Ukraine and seeks to undermine the west, some of the moral questions surging through the book feel resonant again.Eldridge and director Jeremy Herrin first discussed an adaptation in 2018, in the wake of the poisonings of former Russian sleeper spies in Salisbury, a quiet British city. The playwright was struck by how difficult it is to respond to a ruthless leader without sacrificing your own values. “The novel asks you to heed a warning. Where are you left morally if you become the same as your enemy? Suddenly it felt really timely.”But for Eldridge, it is not just the west-Russia tensions in the novel that feel relevant. He points to the rise in populism across the globe and the virulent polarisation that often defines public discourse. One of the great things about le Carré’s novel is that it refuses to romanticise or to endorse stereotypes. “I think this is a grown-up view of the world,” says Eldridge. “It’s saying that part of the responsibility of being an adult is understanding that there aren’t good guys with white hats and bad guys with black hats. That’s not how the world works.”Far from the glamour of James Bond, le Carré’s novel depicts intelligence as a grubby, morally compromising business, whichever side you are on. Leamas is no dashing 007: he’s burnt out, worn down, cynical. In 1963, such candour was revolutionary — and in some quarters unwelcome. But what transforms Leamas is that he falls in love. That spark of defiant humanity, set against all the soul-sapping betrayal and strategy, is what makes the novel so great, says Eldridge.“Le Carré’s humanism is what shines through for me. He says this dirty business keeps us safe but you have to somehow remember what it’s all for. The relationship between Leamas and Liz Gold feels transformative and very important in our version.”We are sitting in a darkened alcove in the National Theatre (where several of Eldridge’s previous plays were first staged), hidden away from the bustling crowds. It is a pleasingly spook-like arrangement. Eldridge sits erect, his watch, Tic Tac mints and notes on the table before him. He could be about to dispatch me on a mission.We talk about the crossovers between theatre and espionage: playwrights, like spymasters, pull the strings from behind the curtains and decide which character gets the chop for the sake of the project. Actors, like spies, play roles for a living. Eldridge has used that overlap in the play: “Where’s the line between the real Alec Leamas and the version Control [head of MI6] is asking him to play?”Even so, translating an intricate spy thriller to the stage is a tricky enterprise. A reader can flip back a few pages to clarify an important, complex plot twist; an audience member has no such luxury. “In the theatre we’re sharing that present tense together,” says Eldridge. “Your mind isn’t able to rewind in quite the same way. So you have to do those reveals in a different way.”Le Carré’s work has never been adapted for theatre before. The company has been helped, says Eldridge, by the generous attitude of the estate and by the frankness of the novelist himself, who said he found the 1965 film, starring Richard Burton, too respectful. Eldridge met le Carré (who died in 2020) once — an encounter that sounds rather like something from one of the author’s books.“It was a bit scary,” Eldridge says. “He was really charming but it was clear I was being given the once-over. He had no interest at all in asking how I was going to adapt his book. He wanted to run the ruler over me. And after about half an hour of this he just said, ‘Well, I don’t know about you, David, but I’m not writing this afternoon. So I think we should have a nice bottle of French white wine.’ And I thought, ‘I’ve passed the test.’”He laughs. Eldridge is an amiable, approachable individual with a down-to-earth streak. Growing up in Romford, a working-class district of north-east London, he says he learned to write partly by working on a 1980s market stall (an experience he dramatised in the 2006 play Market Boy). “You had to find the confidence as a 13-year-old to talk to a woman buying a pair of stilettos. So I always say that the first writing I ever did was improvising as a teenager on a market stall.”It is partly that ear for everyday dialogue and his quick reading of human nature that have propelled his most recent plays, Beginning and Middle, to international success. The first two in a trilogy about relationships, they are tender, honest and beautifully observed two-handers, drawing the audience into crunch exchanges between couples as they struggle to connect.End, the third and final part, is now in the wings. “It’s ready to go. I can’t say anything,” says the playwright, enigmatically, although he does vouchsafe that it’s the most romantic of the three. He adds that coursing through all of them is a common theme: loneliness. “I’ve always written about articulacy. Whether you can say what you want to say. And when you are lonely you don’t have someone with whom you can share what’s in your heart. I think that’s true of all three of those trilogy plays.”Which brings us back to Spy. Alec Leamas is possibly “the loneliest character I’ve ever written”, says Eldridge. “He can’t confide in anyone. I think that’s what le Carré writes about.”Perhaps one of the great attractions of espionage fiction is that it allows the rest of us to experience that loneliness vicariously, without suffering the consequences. Eldridge casts his mind back to a conversation with someone he suspected of being an intelligence officer.“I said, ‘But, of course, you couldn’t tell me.’ And this person said to me, ‘You have no idea how lonely it is.’ That’s always stayed with me.”To September 21, cft.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
