Defective spies aren't so good at telling their own stories
A Morning with Guy Burgess at The Courtyard is a new play that considers the defection of the British spy, his motives and character against the backdrop of the Cold War. Burgess didn't simple defect to Russia (which he apparently couldn’t stand), nor was he simply a spy in the foreign office but he was also homosexual, something that was illegal in both countries. Though this is something, which according to John Morrison’s new play, he never hid.
What the play also conveys is that the atmosphere of that time and the decisions it forced, may now seem almost as foreign to us as the middle ages. For the language, even the jokes of that era, have lost their meaning.
Indeed the programme gives one quick example in the form of a bitter Russian joke from the 1940s: “Is Marxism-Leninism an art or a science? Obviously it is an art; if it was a science, they would have tested it on animals first.” And Guy Burgess in the play, more than once, tells his own joke “My problem is most people like the Russians but hate the system. While I like the system but I can’t stand the Russians.”
No one really makes jokes about Capitalism in the same way, and no one really thinks about life in terms of systems any more – since the one we live under is so pervasive no feasible alternative ever really occurs to us. As a consequence the old whispered jokes (“The Flusterwitze” as they were called in Berlin) died off after the wall fell, as did much of the doublespeak – those conversations in which neither party acknowledged information both shared but neither were supposed to know. This kind of daily doublespeak must have been Burgess’ stock in trade.
Disappointingly, the production falls terribly short of what could be great material for the stage – for, rather than show what Burgess’ life was like, the play uses a heavy-handed conceit to have an ageing Burgess recount his life story to a woman who may or may not be a Russian schoolteacher.
There is no doublespeak – there is only what has happened. And so each part of the life is prefaced and then recounted with almost no sense of dramatic tension. Consequently the play feels less like a dramatic event than a lecture given by a not especially charismatic professor. (And a pretty cumbersome lecture at that – one character’s road trip across the USA is explained by bringing a map of the country onto the stage and then rolling a dinky car over it.)
Interestingly, presented in this way, Burgess' life becomes the antithesis of the system he embraced – for it is exactly this type of individual character study that some would bemoan as the essence of bourgeoisie art. Not that I wouldn’t have minded such bourgeoisie art had it been done slightly better – but the play is too long, too fact-heavy and with few bright spots.
The Courtyard has a great tradition of putting on new work by new writers and performed by inexperienced casts and directors (and that’s certainly to be applauded) but An Morning with Guy Burgess also shows the need for a guiding hand – if no other reason than to give the writers and directors the confidence to cut out the padding such new plays frequently labour under.
A Morning With Guy Burgess runs at The Courtyard until 30th January.
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