Theatre reviews: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold | The Chief - No Apologies

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

The Chief - No Apologies, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

John Le Carré’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is such a masterpiece of postwar literature that adapting it for any other medium seems a high-risk enterprise; and if film is difficult enough, bringing great novels to the stage notoriously requires a shift of narrative technique that can go seriously wrong.

So it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that this current touring production - originally created at Chichester in 2024 - is the first ever stage adaptation of Le Carré’s best known novel, blessed by the great man himself when he met the writer David Eldridge some months before his death in 2020.

Set in the early 1960s, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold tells the story of a British intelligence operative called Alec Leamas, a bit of a rough-cut outsider in the public-school world of the British secret service, and recently traumatised by the brutal shooting in Berlin of his last and best East German informer.

Although concerned that he may be suffering burnout, Leamas’s boss asks him to undertake one last dangerous and complex mission, designed to bring down the East German security chief responsible for the death of Leamas’s agents; and while living undercover in London, Leamas meets and falls in love with a young Jewish librarian called Liz Gold, an idealistic Communist.

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The novel tells the ultimately tragic tale of how their intense love affair derails their lives, and finally exposes the extent to which both of them are used and betrayed by political systems as amoral as they are ruthless; and in David Eldridge’s stage version, Le Carré’s story is told in clever and gripping style, with Leamas’s bosses and mentors - notably the veteran spy George Smiley - often appearing as figures in his imagination, offering advice and wisdom.

Despite these interludes, though, the narrative nonetheless moves forward at a rattling pace on Max Jones’s dark, spare set, strikingly lit by Azusa Ono. Ralf Little plays Leamas with real passion and insight, capturing the poignant central story of a cynical and exhausted man touched and changed by an exceptional love. And around him, a fine supporting cast play their parts with flair and feeling; caught up like the audience in the sheer intensity of Le Carré’s story, and the cold political truths it confronts, as unavoidable today as 60 years ago.

If Le Carré is famous for the fierce sense of moral ambiguity and self-questioning that shapes his novels, Jack Docherty’s The Chief is the very epitome of a leader so bathed in self-satisfaction that no doubt about his own conduct ever crosses his mind.

In his current touring solo show, Doherty’s Chief Commissioner Miekelson - first created as part of the Scot Squad television series, but now out on his own - presents to a grateful audience his new autobiography No Apologies, in which he celebrates his rise to eminence from a comfortable childhood in a Victorian villa in Corstorphine, while dwelling at length on just what a well-liked, liberal-minded and handsome chap he is.

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What’s funny about The Chief, of course, is his absolute lack of self-awareness, as he celebrates his “struggle”, and embraces platitudes about equality, diversity and inclusion without ever intending to make the slightest change either in himself, or in the comfortable world he inhabits. It’s not often that Scottish theatre offers us such a complete portrait of Scottish middle class complacency and small-c conservatism, in all its self-congratulatory glory; and Docherty portrays it with a mastery that is as ruthless as it is side-achingly hilarious - and also completely of this strange, daft and contradictory moment, in Scotland’s national life.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until 25 April, and at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 26-30 May. The Chief - No Apologies is on tour across Scotland until 30 May, see https://gildedballoon.co.uk/the-chief-2026/.

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