In London now, in the very sleek Queen's Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, there is a double bill of short plays by the writer Alan Bennett, called Single Spies. One of these, A Question of Attribution, deals rather sympathetically with the spy Anthony Blunt; the other first appeared five years ago on BBC television under the title of An Englishman Abroad. Based on a meeting in Moscow between a British actress and the traitor Guy Burgess, it presents an affectionate portrait of this rather nasty man. Nothing happens in the play except that the actress is invited to meet Burgess, and he asks her to help him order some clothes from his London tailor and bootmaker.
The impact, such as it is, comes from the portrayal of Burgess himself, not as an evil or bad person but as an eccentric exile, holding on for dear life to his English identity in the seedy environment of a Moscow flat. He is a drunk, he is louche, homosexual, and ill-mannered, but he is so terribly British for all that, having his clothes and shoes made in London and being altogether such a character, that the audience is coaxed into indulgence for him.
Particularly Flagrant
Guy Burgess, though a "character," was not a clown; he became known to the British public and the world as a particularly flagrant and unpleasant traitor, who, with the help of Kim Philby, escaped to Moscow and the tacky life portrayed in this show. Aside from the notoriety of his espionage, Burgess had and has no public significance--which does not stop Bennett from exploiting the notoriety while belittling the moral aspect of the espionage.
Writing about the television production in 1984, I referred to the famous E.M. Forster quote, "If I have to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I shall have the courage to betray my country." The excuse for preferring a friend to one's country is that a friend might support you where your country would regard you as expendable. However, Forster said in the same quote that he hated the idea of causes; and Burgess' choice was not between friend and country, but precisely between causes: Western democracy on the one hand, and on the other, Stalinist communism.
Bennett said at the time of the play's television premiere that he did not know what treason meant. The tone of this confession implied that Bennett did not consider such knowledge worth having and did not feel that its consequences mattered very much. This disingenuous political philistinism--accepting communism by default--is today's complement to that of an earlier generation of the British elite, represented by Burgess, Philby, and others, whose betrayal of Western values had more serious consequences than an irritating show on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Though this play and its minor companion piece are now playing in a commercial house, they were first staged at the National Theatre. Their treatment of the central political conflict of our time highlights the thirty year growth of a left-wing orthodoxy--denigrating national loyalties and implicitly rejecting Western values--within the confines of Britain's subsidized theater. This trend began harmlessly enough with the fashionable antiestablishment prejudice of "serious" theater in the mid-fifties. These years are now regarded as something of a watershed in British theatrical life. According to
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