Based on a true story of cold war espionage, Hugh Whitemore's attempt at dramatising a conflict in which betrayal and subterfuge play a large part was originally made for TV, which is perhaps where it belongs. The cast do their best to breathe some life into this lifeless piece of docu-drama but they are let down by the play's almost complete lack of suspense and dramatic tension.
       Bob and Barbara are a typical middle-class suburban couple with a teenage daughter (Julie, excellently played by Corinne Sawers). They don't have a lot of friends but they are close to a Canadian couple living in an identical semi-detached house opposite, who, would you believe it, are spying for the KGB. (We know this from the start, unless you were lucky enough not to have read any of the publicity or the programme.) Helen, the spy-in-chief, is a brash but warm-hearted soul and her husband Peter a retiring bookish type. When Stewart, a special branch officer, visits and asks for Bob and Barbara's permission to place a surveillance operative in Julie's bedroom they reluctantly agree, and the gradual betrayal of their friends begins.
       You might expect that there would be some tension with Bob and Barbara having their loyalties are being split between friends and country, and there is an attempt to portray this as Barbara (Jenny Seagrove) gets increasingly overwrought, but it's all very stiff-upper-lip and contained, with Seagrove's relatively monotone delivery hiding what we're to assume is going on beneath. A series of direct-to-the-audience soliloquies by several characters only breaks the tension further. There is one heart-wrenching scene, when Julie is informed of the fact that her favourite "auntie and uncle" are spies, but otherwise this play fell flat with me.
Chris Brody