Katherine MacAlister sees Single Spies, Alan Bennett’s double bill about espionage

“You pissed in their tea and they drank it,” Coral Browne played by Belinda Lang drawls to Guy Burgess, aka Nicholas Farrell, while discussing his treachery. “What I want to know is why?”

It’s a good question and one that Alan Bennett stretches out throughout Single Spies, his revisited double bill of two plays linked by their leads, both part of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” they both lament from their stiff upper lips in both An Englishman Abroad and A Question Of Attribution.

The first short play is set in Moscow where Guy Burgess, wonderfully envisaged by Farrell reflects on his life, his defection and admits to an enormous yearning for his mother country, his passion for politics rendered as tatty as his suit as his regrets float palpably across the air of his prison like apartment.

The problem, it turns out, is that his charm is wasted on his Russian masters, and nostalgia had overtaken the formerly enthusiastic traitor. He misses England, the countryside, London, his tailor, pyjamas, his mother. He has too much time to think. He misses talking, meeting exciting people, intellectualising.

Instead he is reduced to drinking himself into an early grave, burning his lunch and waiting for his one phone call a day from his Russian masters and taking his visitors as he finds them. His loneliness is tragic. Carol Browne, a visiting actress, is his latest vessel, and she makes us consider how we feel about his crime and whether we should forgive him as readily as he, and his new and unexpected ally the actress, expect us to.

It is The Queen (again Lang) who asks the same question in the second half. Her Surveyor of Pictures Anthony Blunt, also the Professor of the History of Art at the University of London and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, turns out to have been a keen spy in the 30s, and is now desperately treading water before he nationally exposed, feeding MI5 useless information to buy himself more time.

The focus is a Titian painting that Blunt, played by David Robb, investigates in the Queen’s collection. Cleaning reveals additional figures and x-rays even more. The pertinent question is not about whether it’s a fake, but whether it matters, whether additions by the school of Titian change anything, whether art should just be enjoyed as it is, whether art history actually takes away from our appreciation.

Many of these questions hail from The Queen, who pops in to view her collection when a public swimming pool opening is unexpectedly cancelled. But what we soon realise is that she is using the allegory to let Blunt know she is on to him.

Wonderfully British and whipping along with typical Bennett briskness, brush aside the humour and the audience is left reflecting on forgiveness and patriotism.

Perhaps why they did it, is still the question that Bennett wants answering.

But this is classic Playhouse fare, big names, a vast challenge for the tiny cast who conducted themselves with aplomb and a well practised and thought provoking plot, as relevant today as it was then.

Single Spies is on until Saturday. Box office on 01865 305305 or oxfordplayhouse.com