Spoiler Alert!
The Millennium Centre in Cardiff starts to fill prior to a performance of “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold” starring Ralf Little as Alec Leamas. For me, the plot is too complex to render effectively in a two-hour stage play, although the cast played their roles superbly.
They made more of a fist of the second half, focusing on the tribunal to determine whether or not Mundt is a British spy, and the final denouement when Leamas and his lover, Liz Gold, are killed climbing the Berlin Wall, although the final tragedy is too rushed for my taste.
The problem with dramatising a novel like this is what to leave out, as everything is contingent on everything else. If you haven’t read the novel, this is probably a good evening’s entertainment. If you have, it’ll leave you wanting more, a longer play certainly, and for me, possibly, a four-hour play.
The other aspect of this is that the novel is essentially a three-act story, not two. In this adaptation, the final act in which Leamas reaches the terrible recognition, his anagnorisis in classical terms, that the entire operation was designed not to destroy Mundt but to protect him, is brutally compressed into ten minutes of direction.
This is the real failure of modern theatre. Few audiences are prepared to sit through an extra hour (or two), but in this story, Le Carre absolutely demands it, despite writing it with suffocating compression. It needs that space to breathe, and it isn’t given it. The realisation falls too quickly, and the consequence is, despite Little’s exceptional stagecraft, the final moments are devoid of emotion.
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