Over sixty years after its first publication, John le Carré’s classic novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has finally made it onto the stage. Intrigue and espionage play out within the claustrophobic confines of the theatre, where we watch reluctant spy Alec Leamas embark on what hopes will be his final operation. Yet nothing is as it seems, and an increasingly paranoid Leamas starts to suspect that his old friend George Smiley has entrapped him in a complex plan of which Leamas can only see the surface.

It is a setup that means The Spy Who Came in from the Cold hits all the notes you want from a spy thriller, which is only to be expected from a play based on one of the defining novels of the genre, written by one of its enduring masters. Such a heritage can also be a drawback, however, for what was novel and exciting in the sixties risks being dated and familiar in the present day. Like Alec Leamas himself, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is now out of its own time, struggling to adjust, and unsure what it can still offer as the world moves on.

Hale people don’t become spies, and after two decades of covert work, Leamas is at the edge of his endurance. To quote the man himself:

What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.

Leamas has had a hard time of it in East Berlin, losing one informant after another to his arch-nemesis Mundt of German counter-intelligence. After his latest and last source Karl dies while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall, Leamas returns to London dejected and intending to quit the service. Yet his superiors use his desire to revenge himself on Mundt to convince Leamas to take on one last operation, designed to deceive the Stasi into disposing of Mundt as a putative double-agent.

It is the perfect role for Leamas, who has little difficulty ‘acting’ the disgruntled, resentful, ex-spy who might sell state secrets to the highest bidder. Leamas is no James Bond, something which Le Carré explicitly intended. There is, however, still a girl: Liz Gold, a young Jewish woman active in the Communist Party of Great Britain, who for reasons that remain unclear falls in love with the much older Leamas.

Here the story feels the constraints of the stage's limitations of time, space and medium. Unlike in a novel or movie, we cannot access the inner thoughts of the characters to understand emotions, motivations and contradictions. Instead, these must be declared, and it is on such a declaration that the show starts. Staying close to the source material, we are mostly told rather than shown what our characters think and feel, and the result is not wholly convincing. Clever staging shows us Leamas’ inner conflicts through conversation with an imagined Smiley, but the monologue remains expository rather than compelling. “Is this a dagger I see before me” (or behind me!) it is not.

The romantic element similarly suffers. The young, idealist woman being fatally attracted to the cynical older man is a rather worn trope, and while there is nothing wrong with an age difference in principle, a modern audience might expect to have explained why Liz Gold falls for Leamas, apart from his callous cynicism, incipient alcoholism, and the demands of the plot. The age difference here is neither as problematic nor as central as in So Young, but both shows simply assume that it is natural for young women to rapidly fall in love with older men. That may well be the case in the imaginations of older men – and So Young is admittedly a commentary on that – but it bears little relation to reality.

Consequently, it is difficult to become invested in the human drama of the show, making it feel both flat and overwrought at the same time. The dramatic agonising or professions of love are not as convincing as the more subtle options that novel or film might have afforded. What then remains is the puzzle of the intrigue, and if the dénouement of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is mildly predictable, it is only because it suffers from its nature as a classic. It is stories like this that made the double- or triple-cross, the morally grey quandaries of espionage and statecraft, and the grudging respect for the adversary into the familiar tropes they are today. For a contemporary audience, that familiarity does unfortunately further lessen the emotional and moral force of the finale. Whether a contemporaneous reader would have been provoked by the suggestion that the United Kingdom might avail itself of dubious methods and allies I do not know, but to a cynical 21st century audience it is hardly a surprise.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold remains an entertaining classic, although this stage adaptation felt creative constrained rather than stimulated by the inherent limitations of theatre. As a faithful retelling, however, it can only offer entertainment and the warm glow of familiarity and brilliant craftsmanship, and will likely be progressively hobbled by its increasingly archaic mores and tropes. There is a rich Anglophone tradition of reinventing our classics, through dialogue, reinterpretation, or both. An opportunity was missed to bring this spy not just in from the cold, but also into the 21st century.

Notes & Suggestions

• While Leamas and Smiley may agonise over their associations with former Nazis, their superiors betrayed no such scruples. Operation Paperclip is only the most notable example of the large-scale 'acquisition' of former Nazi scientists and officials by the victorious Allies.
• Undercover agents entering into deceitful relationships with young women isn’t just something out of fiction. In the United Kingdom, the inquiry into the ‘spycops’ scandal, where officers of the Metropolitan Police deceived women activists into relationships, is still ongoing. The victims are still fighting to get justice. You can read about their campaign here.
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold will remain on tour throughout the UK until August 2026. Tour dates and further information are on the show’s website.

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