In John le Carré’s 1963 name-making novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, searchlight beams sweeping the border of cold war Berlin are called “theatrical”. And, like a stage lighting designer, the writer frequently specifies an illumination source – sun, moon, desk lamp, ceiling fixture, torch.
Movie-makers soon took the hint from these lightbulb moments, with Martin Ritt’s 1965 version of the story, starring Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, the MI6 agent who has lost his self beneath too many cover stories. But it is only six decades after the book’s publication – and almost four years since the writer’s death – that this story becomes the first staged le Carré. It’s been adapted by David Eldridge, directed by Jeremy Herrin and Azusa Ono visualises the lighting states laid down in the book.
Reread now, le Carré’s novel is a twisting thriller about the pressures of pretence and lying, in spying and love, but heavy with of-the-time racial and sexual slang that may put some readers off. Sensibly, Eldridge keeps the plot but washes the argot. The narrative compression is elegant, pages becoming single lines, and the timeline jumbled to increase tension about whether some events are Leamas’s imaginings, nightmares or false memories.
George Smiley – the donnish spymaster who features in nine le Carré books – is a minor presence in this novel but understandably maximised on stage, linking the action somewhat to the lectures on spy craft that he gives in the book The Secret Pilgrim. John Ramm as Smiley vividly captures the razor-sharp mind inside a body sheathed by good living and tweed suits. Admirers of Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman as screen Smileys may be shocked at the extreme moral ambiguity of this iteration. Ramm also plays another vital role, one of Herrin’s clever uses of budget-enforced doubling to underline Leamas’s mental disintegration; he keeps thinking he has seen people before as, theatrically, he has.
Leamas is the origin of the much-used trope, in comic and serious spy fiction, of the spy who might be a double or triple agent, with quadruple not ruled out. In a star-making performance, Rory Keenan agonisingly and waspishly embodies how multiple cover stories have left Leamas, as the book puts it, “at odds with himself”, with a hole at his centre that drink and bitter wit fill, leaving no room for love. Eldridge and the actors gently stress how often the final title word is spoken – weather, hearts, bedsits, calculations all “cold” – but, as often in le Carré, the heat of attraction offers a pulsing subplot. Agnes O’Casey’s librarian Liz Gold, making a small role pivotal, portrays the pain – central to le Carré’s women – of loving a man who may be faking his own passion.
The novelist’s posthumous stage airing is part of a significant artistic afterlife for le Carré – October sees the publication of Karla’s Choice, a sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold written by the novelist’s son Nick Harkaway, and there are enticing rumours of a long-form TV series based on the Smiley novels. Le Carré also wrote Ronnie Boy, an unperformed 2015 stage play that, on the evidence of this hot night of theatre, might also be thawed out from the cold archives.
• At Minerva theatre, Chichester, until 21 September
