‘A man who betrays once can do it twice. The second time is easier.’
After dishing out my views about everyone else's plays for the past three years or so, I'm now putting my head over the parapet by co-producing one of my own. It opens on Tuesday Jan 11 at London's Courtyard Theatre in Hoxton and is directed by Dimitry Devdariani, who is doing a fantastic job with a highly versatile cast of eight actors. This play had a reading at Player-Playwrights a year ago but in Dimitry's production I am discovering new aspects to every scene.
A MORNING WITH GUY BURGESS
A summer’s morning, Moscow 1963. As the Soviet Union’s first woman cosmonaut is feted in Red Square, exiled spy Guy Burgess refills his glass and decides that twelve years in the socialist paradise is enough. His liver has reached the point of no return, his Soviet controllers have lost interest in him, and even the prospect of umpiring Donald Maclean’s cricket match no longer appeals. But his dreams of returning to his old haunts in London are interrupted by an unexpected visitor -- who also has a story to tell. The play tells the story of a spy who never really wanted to defect at all, and asks wider questions about the nature of belief, loyalty and betrayal. Above all, it explores Burgess's tortured relationship with his new homeland -- Russia.
‘Think of me as an English sputnik sent into the wrong orbit. Or a misdirected parcel from the Cold War. I have reached a destination of sorts, but it was not the one I intended.’
A Morning With Guy Burgess draws on new information that has emerged from KGB archives in the last 20 years, as well as my own conversations with people who knew Burgess, including the Soviet spy who controlled him in London in the late 1940s and helped arrange his spectacular defection in 1951.
"Nobody could possibly suspect me of being a spy. My fingernails are dirty. My flies are undone. It’s the perfect cover.’
Late news: rehearsal pictures are now on Flickr.
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