Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The tools of surveillance loom over Max Jones’s set for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold at the Minerva theatre in Chichester: an ugly corrugated tin hut accompanied by a searchlight whose merciless beam sweeps the auditorium at key moments. It’s an image instantly evocative of the cold war and of the grim little fortresses that punctuated the Iron Curtain slicing through Europe.But for Alec Leamas, the lonely, burnt-out agent at the heart of John le Carré’s great espionage thriller, that edgy fear of surveillance means something more. In David Eldridge’s tense, gripping adaptation, staged with moody flair by Jeremy Herrin, Leamas is never not being watched from the shadows — by his superiors, by his enemies, by the audience. The starkest scrutiny of all comes from his own conscience, which has begun to consume him in a way no enemy ever could. That crisis of identity is at the heart of this intelligent, atmospheric production which fillets the novel, reframing its moral issues for the stage and drawing us into Leamas’s head as his sense of self begins to unravel. Key to this is the way Eldridge and Herrin riff on the parallels between theatre and espionage — the role-play, the rules, the subtext. Rory Keenan’s Leamas sets the scene, filling in the picture for anyone too young to recall a Europe bisected literally and ideologically, and introducing the characters entangled in the novel’s byzantine mission. In Herrin’s production they hover permanently on the sidelines, waiting for their cue to enter, and the show leans into the beloved tropes of spy fiction: the murky, noirish lighting (Azusa Ono), the threads of mournful sax music (Paul Englishby), the crisp, gnomic dialogue. There is a definite sense of playing a game here, a lethal game, in which individuals have roles. It is Leamas’s shrewd awareness of this and his growing despair that form the nub of the play. Soon it is not clear, for him or for us, where the role ends, as memories and imagined conversations begin to invade both his mind and the stage. There is a narrative price to this splintered style — it’s quite bitty and sketchy — but it pays dividends, building a sense of disorientation.Keenan makes an excellent Leamas: wary, weary, worn. He begins crisply cynical, making sharp asides to the audience and surveying his patrician boss with undisguised contempt. But gradually he seems to sink into himself as if the air is being let out of him — it is beautifully controlled. He is matched by Ian Drysdale’s supercilious Control (head of MI6), John Ramm’s smooth master spy, Smiley, and Gunnar Cauthery’s steely ex-Nazi Mundt.The most touching performances are from Philip Arditti’s ardently idealistic communist, Fiedler, and from Agnes O’Casey as Liz Gold, the open-hearted librarian who falls in love with Leamas, rekindling his damaged humanity. That she is cynically used by the mission jolts Leamas into action and throws a stark searchlight on to Smiley’s questionable assertion that “intelligence work has one moral law — it is justified by results.” It’s that troubling thought that follows you out into the night.★★★★☆To September 21, cft.org.uk
