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The Spy Who Came In From The Cold review: ‘hugely satisfying stage adaptation’★★★★
There is a strong Jewish presence in this taut le Carré Cold War thriller which has more twists than a cheese stick
December 2, 2025 18:25
There is a strong Jewish presence in this taut le Carré Cold War thriller which has more twists than a cheese stick
December 2, 2025 18:25John le Carré was not averse to informing his spy novels with a Jewish presence. In the Little Drummer Girl (1983) an Israeli spy recruits a left-wing British actress to infiltrate a Palestinian terror cell. In The Tailor of Panama (1996) the Jewish Harry Pendel is actually a former convict with a shadowy past not known even to his wife and children.
The character exposed le Carré to accusations that he had created a Jewish trope. However, in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963), two pivotal Jewish characters are examples of how he saw Jews as “the whipping boy of our European disorder”, as he so succinctly put it.
Using not much more than shadowy lighting and solid acting, this hugely satisfying stage adaptation by David Eldridge conjures a heady dose of period nostalgia without a scintilla of sentimentality.
The play’s two pivotal Jewish characters are examples of how he saw Jews as the whipping boy of our European disorder, as he so succinctly put it
Taking its cue from the 1965 black-and-white film adaptation of the novel starring Richard Burton, Jeremy Herrin’s production has a muted visual palette of post-war austerity.
Rory Kennan is the world-weary, even dog-eared British spy Alec Leamas who is called back to London from Berlin after witnessing his last surviving agent shot dead. But Leamas’s controller has one more job in mind.
The objective is to neutralise Mundt (Gunnar Cauthery) Leamas’s East German counterpart. The spymaster was a Nazi before becoming an agent of the communist regime. He has ruthlessly killed all the agents Leamas was responsible for in East Berlin and during a stint in London he even attempted to kill le Carré’s best-known creation, the inscrutable George Smiley (here played by John Ramm). To set the trap Leamas must do what comes naturally; drink a lot and project an air of solipsistic nihilism while working in his new dead-end job working in a library. These are characteristics that his new boss Miss Crail (Norma Atallah) finds objectionable but which his Jewish Marxist colleague Liz Gold (a very good Agnes O’Casey) finds irresistible.
There are more twists than a cheese stick. Yet Eldridge’s version of the plot has a clarity that keeps the tension as tight as the barbed wire that separates East and West Berlin.
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
@Soho Place
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