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Alan Bennett’s Single Spies: Lifting the Veil of Personal and Institutional Secrecy

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Published/Copyright: November 12, 2020

Abstract

This article explores Alan Bennett’s Single Spies (1988), an espionage double bill comprising “An Englishman Abroad” and “A Question of Attribution,” proposing that the personalizing of social, political, and historical themes, as well as the astute documentation of a decaying Englishness and its class system in both plays, are representative of the work of a playwright whose output deserves serious critical attention. The study focuses on how Bennett historicizes the actions of his infamous protagonists (Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt) while challenging assumptions regarding patriotism. Single Spies is a Cambridge Five franchise, demonstrating the playwright’s characteristic wit, irony, and reflection on personal and national identity, illusion, and sacrifice. The one-act plays each deal with a key figure in the notorious Cambridge spy ring, enhancing the dramatic effect through the use of onstage theatrical and visual allusions. In the first play, references to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c 1599), together with English music, highlight Burgess’s duality and the bitter reality of his post-defection life in Russia, while the second play is notable for its use of two paintings (Titian and a Venetian Senator and Allegory of Prudence) as key images and conceits suggesting the gradual uncovering of the Cambridge Five. The paper therefore suggests that Bennett’s ability to lift the veil of personal and institutional secrecy, while airing his own ambivalence, confirms him as a skillful, if academically undervalued, commentator on Englishness.

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Published Online: 2020-11-12
Published in Print: 2020-11-03

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. The Past as Prologue: Imagining a Brave New World in Philip Osment’s This Island’s Mine
  4. Alan Bennett’s Single Spies: Lifting the Veil of Personal and Institutional Secrecy
  5. “Pravda for Playboy”: David Edgar’s The Shape of the Table and the Eastern European Roundtables
  6. Rewriting Trauma: The Legacy of W.B. Yeats in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats . . .
  7. A Fallen-Soufflé Crisis in Dinner with Friends
  8. Storytelling in Apocalyptic Times: Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play
  9. Posthuman Dystopia: Animal Surrealism and Permanent Crisis in Contemporary British Theatre
  10. Book Reviews
  11. Carl Lavery, ed. Performance and Ecology: What Can Theatre Do? Abingdon: Routledge, 2018, xiv + 118 pp., £115 (hardback).
  12. S.E. Wilmer. Performing Statelessness in Europe. London: Palgrave, 2018, ix + 245 pp., £79.99 (hardback), £79.99 (paperback), £79.99 (PDF ebook).
  13. Graham Saunders. Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriations in Contemporary British Drama: “Upstart Crows. London: Palgrave, 2017, xii + 194 pp. €96.29 (hardback), €74.96 (PDF ebook).
  14. Marissia Fragkou. Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Politics, Affect, Responsibility. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, xi + 233 pp., £67.50 (hardback), £64.80 (PDF ebook).
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  20. Catherine Rees. Adaptation and Nation: Theatrical Contexts for Contemporary English and Irish Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017, ix + 185 pp., £79.99 (hardback), £63.99 (PDF ebook). Frances Babbage. Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre: Performing Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2018, 280 pp., £67.50 (hardback), £64.80 (PDF ebook). Kara Reilly, ed. Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018, xxix + 357 pp., £80.00 (hardback), £63.99 (PDF ebook).
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