Ben Rea (1980)

The subject of the first play in Spy![1] had none of the glamour of Britain’s best-known moles of recent months, the real-life Anthony Blunt and the fictional Bill Haydon.  John Vassall was set in 1950s Moscow – drab, silent, freezing in the Cold War.  This was worlds away from the psychophysical labyrinth of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (never mind the church spires and choral nunc dimittis in the closing titles sequence that John Irvin used as an ironic counterpoint to ‘The Circus’).  Ruth Carter’s script for John Vassall even implied that the title character (John Normington), a junior member of staff at the British Embassy in Moscow, might have got his posting there simply because, as a single man, he required less accommodation.   There was a promising dramatic irony here:  in the event, Vassall’s increasing feelings of isolation were what tempted him into the city’s homosexual underground.  This triggered the threats of blackmail that supposedly led to his working as a Soviet spy.  Yet the play’s description of Vassall’s messy life in Moscow didn’t develop and the ‘dramatised reconstruction’ gradually withered into an illustrated documentary.  There was more and more information in the soundtrack narrative but little penetration of character – all the way up to Vassall’s arrest and imprisonment on spying charges the best part of a decade later, in 1962.  He received an eighteen-year prison sentence and served ten years in three different British prisons.  The relative harshness of his sentence won’t be lost on a post-‘Fourth Man’ audience but John Vassall can hardly claim credit for that impact[2].

The early stages of the play, directed by Ben Rea, were the best.  Vassall was established as a man of, as he later admitted, limited intelligence and larger social pretension, initially treating his term in Moscow as ‘an adventure’ – with the enthusiasm of a tourist and a social climber, without much sense of responsibility towards his seemingly tedious Embassy work.  The unobtrusive editing sometimes reinforced the contrast between consecutive scenes by not emphasising a break between them and the story moved fluently towards the seduction of Vassall.  It was during this pivotal ‘honeytrap’ episode that I started having doubts about the play.  From a purely practical point of view:  why were there so many seducers?   It must have been hard to get incriminating photographs of Vassall under all the competing flesh.  And how did Vassall react to the seduction?  The polite lack of responsiveness that Mavis Nicholson noted in her interview with him for this week’s Radio Times was mirrored in the play, where it seemed a more glaring omission.  Ruth Carter’s piece changed from a character study into a case history – a cruel fate for the protagonist who, we were told more than once at the start, valued his individuality.  Carter’s script eventually suggested made a crude link between Vassall’s behaviour and a mother obsession that explained his homosexuality etc etc.  It’s worth noting that Vassall points out in the Radio Times interview that the letters he wrote home, all addressed solely to his mother according to the play, were written to both his parents.

John Normington was expected to blend the few character traits the script supplied – hints of the cultural poseur and the social climber, a whiff of irresponsibility – with a few camp gestures and expressions, then keep repeating the mixture he came up with.  He had to do this virtually in a vacuum, since Vassall was rarely engaged in action or conversation.  It was a thankless task but Normington held on to the character tenaciously.  He was especially good at creating physically contrasting impressions – of dapper self-approval one moment, flabby helplessness the next.  He managed to convey the brittleness of a man who was lacking in support of any kind.  But Vassall’s role was so predominantly passive and reluctant there was only so much Normington could do.  The more active agents – those who manipulated Vassall – were Sinister Foreigners with either a poker face or a maniacal laugh (John Abineri, in the former category, was the best of these).

For those sick of television espionage the arrival of Spy! on our screens might seem a crushing blow.  Allan Prior conceived the series shortly before Tinker Tailor had turned Britain into a nation of mole-hunters, and the Fourth Man affair hit the headlines.  But the BBC will need more lively material than John Vassall for Spy! to be a hit.  The inherent limitation of ‘faction’ – that the audience may well know the ending – was virtually acknowledged by Ruth Carter, who made no attempt to dramatise events once Vassall had begun to be blackmailed by the Russians.  (The protagonist even stopped writing the letters home that told us something about himself.)  There was nothing about KGB methods of interrogation or what kind of information Vassall was passing to the Soviet Union; nothing either about his sexual habits before or after his time in Moscow.    It was as if the script had been put together entirely from looking at old newspaper cuttings.  This was tough on John Normington and tough too on John Vassall, who ‘now lives alone, under an assumed name’.  Vassall lives to see his real name and his treachery dragged through the mud in a drama series with a finger-pointing title.  It’s adding insult to injury that the recreation of his story doesn’t bring him to life as the individual he was supposedly proud to be.

[January 1980]

[1]  Afternote:  The BBC series Spy!, broadcast in early 1980, comprised six single plays, each based on a true story from what IMDB calls ‘the murky world of twentieth-century espionage’.

[2]  Afternote:  Sir Anthony Blunt was named in November 1979 as the ‘Fourth Man’ in the Cambridge spy ring.  Blunt had confessed to being a Soviet spy back in 1964 after being offered immunity from prosecution.